A film review by Craig J. Koban April 29, 2016

ONE MORE TIME

2016, R, 96 mins.

Robert Edwards’ ONE MORE TIME is superficially about a dysfunctional family unit and an aging, washed up pop star, so thoughts of it spiraling out of control and into multiple overused and stale genre conventions were pretty overwhelming for me going in.  

Surprisingly, the film is quite a bit more perceptive and smartly defined with its characters than I was frankly expecting.  The whole cast really invests in their respective roles with appealing enthusiasm, which is greatly complimented by a screenplay that peppers the narrative with dialogue exchanges that have a stark frankness and spontaneity to them.  That, and we have, of course, the sublime pleasure of witnessing yet another delightfully idiosyncratic performance by the great Christopher Walken, whom dominates nearly every scene he’s in as his spotlight-hogging, aging entertainer. 

ONE MORE TIME is not primarily his character’s story, though, as it also concerns the plight of his semi-estranged daughter.  The film opens on a delightfully droll scene as we're introduced to a young man and woman that are apparently in the process of capitalizing on a one-night-stand.  He tries to put both of their minds at ease and secure the mood of the moment by placing an album on his turntable, which belts out an old school jingle from an iconic crooner.  The woman very quickly and without hesitation asks the man to take the LP off and put something else on, to which he acquiesces.  What we learn in the morning after is that the ageless album that the man wanted to play was from Paul Lombard (Walken), who used to be a widely successful and popular singer.  His daughter, it turns out, is the same woman from this opening scene that requested the album be removed during her nocturnal makeout session.  

Listening to her daddy’s album while having sex with a stranger would be highly…awkward. 

Jude (Amber Heard) has fallen on very difficult times. She’s a talented songstress and musician just like her father, but has never fully capitalized on her unique abilities.  She’s also about to be evicted from her Manhattan apartment, and with substantial job prospects looking slim she reluctantly ventures out to her father’s Hamptons home.  As soon as she arrives there tension between all family members can immediately be felt.  Her constant refusal to call Paul “dad” irritates him almost as much as “living in the slums of Hampton.”  Paul seems affluent and prosperous, but he constantly wishes that he did more with his career, which manifests now in his yearning to cut a new album, more to satisfy the needs of his ego than any deep and burner artistic ambition.  Paul’s home life is further distracted by his wife (the latest in a multitude, played by Ann Magnuson), whom only he seems to love and respect.  Paul’s other daughter Corinne (Kelli Garner) uses the family home as a second base of operations for her restaurant business.  Her husband (Hamish Linklater) does most of the stay-at-home parenting duties, catering after the needs of their young son.  He may or may not still have feelings for Jude, seeing as there are hints sprinkled through the narrative that they once were a potential item. 

The central conflict in the film, predictably enough, is between Paul and Jude, and even though it does cross off many of the clichés of failed father/daughter relationships that we’ve seen countless times before in other movies, Edwards still manages to infuse it with a multitude of well written individual scenes that have a stinging sarcasm.  Paul seems to regret how his daughter never became a name in music like him and failed to use her obvious and ample gifts, which frequently angers Jude, who never really elevated her career beyond a punk band she was a part of that’s somewhat disbanded now.  Verbal standoffs between the pair cuts right to the heart of their mutually resentment of one another (“I notice your contempt for our music didn’t stop you from banging our drummer” she lashes out at one point).  Intriguingly, Paul never falsely hides behind his past and current indiscretions.  He’s not a perfect or good man, per se, but he's a forthright and self-critical one.  His desire to be a bit hit yet again with a new album annoys Jude to no end.  She calls him out for being an elderly joke in an industry that laughs at his kind now, to which he pathetically, but convincingly responds, “I know.  You don’t think I know that?” 

Heard is a limitlessly gorgeous woman, which often distracts viewers from noticing that she’s a very competent actress when given the right material to sink her teeth into.  She’s wholeheartedly credible as her pink-haired, goth inspired Jude that seems to have big chips on her shoulder about…well…everyone and everything around her.  Heard isn't afraid of not making her character endearing in any way.  The supporting cast, as mentioned, assembled around her is also homogeneously solid, especially Kelli Garner in what could have been a rather one-note wife role; instead, she infuses a lot of no-nonsense sass and gumption in it.  Oliver Pratt also appears in a very Oliver Prattian role as the family lawyer, who gets some of the film’s better laughs quipping at the expense of Jude’s name.  At one point during a rather heated dinner conversation – during which time Jude objects to her father’s insistence of launching a new record – Pratt’s solicitor deadpans, “Hey Jude.  Don’t make it bad.” 

But, c’mon, ONE MORE TIME exists as an engine to let Christopher Walken loose.  The actor, as of late, belongs on a list of other iconic celebs whose own highly eccentric brand of performance showmanship has made him the stuff of showbiz parody.  Yet, Walken is a rarity out of the bunch that seems to acknowledge his own inherent weirdness and peculiar inflections as an actor and simply goes with it as to not reduce himself to be the butt of self-mockery in his films.  Also, Walken is one of our greatest living actors, something that gets lost on many film viewers, and the cool and efficient manner that he slides into all of the tantalizing conundrums of Paul is a pure delight to behold.  In particular, it’s a real trip to see the elderly star sing in a film (often forgotten is the fact that he initially trained in musical theatre before moving on to acting in film work) and a wondrously melancholic duet he performs with Heard of Frank and Nancy Sinatra’s “Something Stupid” is a bona fide highlight moment in ONE MORE TIME.  Walken’s vocals aren’t refined and polished, but rather more compellingly reflect his own beguilingly weird aura that he brings to every film he’s in. 

ONE MORE TIME is a bit too short for its own good.  At just 96 minutes, some of its various subplot threads lack development and payoff, whereas many more are thrown at viewers that serve the purposes of mechanically moving the story forward.  It also could easily be said that a family drama replete with despondent and selfish people (some of which have had very productive and rich lives) is emotionally arduous to endure (plus, Heard’s Jude, despite her deep commitment to the role, never become a figure to fully invest in and root for).  Still, Edwards remains quite adept throughout ONE MORE TIME at delivering multiple scenes of family strife with an unforced naturalness and an uncommon realism that many other similar films fail to generate.  He also seems unwilling to throw stones at any of his questionable characters out of spite, nor is he inclined to make any of them completely likeable either.  In lesser hands in front of and behind the camera, ONE MORE TIME could have wallowed in crude caricature and insipid soap opera melodrama.  For the most part, Edwards crafts a mostly absorbing portrait of self-absorbed people that manage to stick together despite their deeply rooted flaws.