![]() ![]() It’s one thing to make suggestions about the amount of money involved for some of these content providers, and to correctly suggest that there was more money in the extremes of anti-Heard sentiment than in anything more measured. But even when the editing is clever enough to imply something truly notable, the chosen documentary format prevents insight. ![]() Heard is able to acknowledge and discuss it. There are definitely points at which commentators in the documentary acknowledge and observe the toxic taint of the online conversation around the trial - not so much that people supported Depp over Heard, but that the most visible of Depp supporters did so with bizarre familiarity and cackling glee, while Twitter responses to Heard tended toward abuse and misogyny.īut people already recognized this fly in the sociological ointment at the time. The documentary’s concentration is on the court-of-public-opinion aspect of the Virginia trial, but not in a new or interesting way, or a way that asks questions or seeks answers. There’s a lot of actual “legal” stuff that’s barely mentioned, as if to say, “Look, most of the people blathering about the case didn’t understand Virginia defamation law on anything more than a superficial level, so why should the documentary?” In fact, it tells us decidedly less than we knew coming in because the Virginia trial was inextricably linked to a previous libel case in the U.K., a case that’s barely mentioned. Heard isn’t going to tell us anything more about the case than we knew coming in. ![]() That’s all intercut with the cottage industry of online pundits, some boasting legal credentials and some just boasting a passionate devotion to the star of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.Ĭooper isn’t a reporter here and so Depp v. It’s a device that allows viewers to discover that in a trial that boiled down to he said/she said, “he” and “she” did, in fact, say different things. Heard, Cooper and her editor’s grand structural gesture is to put Depp’s and Heard’s testimonies side by side so that we get each of their respective takes on now-notorious incidents like the poop-in-the-bed, the sliced fingertip and the airplane fight. It’s a technique that works best if the filmmaker is able to find previously unseen primary texts or to edit together the footage that we think we know in a way that presents new context or forces us to make new connections. There are no talking heads or freshly contributed voices, just the stream of information that was being disseminated to the public through the trial. ![]() Heard breaks down the basics of the Fairfax County, Virginia, trial in the present tense without interest in, or the advantage of, hindsight. Surely not an exception to my rule that three-hour documentaries should almost always be either trimmed by an hour or expanded by multiple hours, Depp v. I’m sure some of the most vocal and flamboyant of online Johnny Depp supporters will be happy to see themselves represented with so little pushback, so maybe it will be a fun time capsule for them? The documentary isn’t wholly without attempted balance, but if you actually were conscious when the legal mess was unfolding, it’s generally pointless. Heard is sure to be vaguely enlightening and disheartening, but otherwise, it’s hard to know who the ideal audience would be. Using social media responses from the trial, along with pool footage of courtroom testimony, Cooper is able to give an overview of what may or may not have been the first “TikTok trial,” to capture the sloppiness of the legal process and the spectacular biases of online sentiment - and to say exactly what was already evident to everybody at the time.įor viewers coming out of a 10-year coma, Depp v. Heard, arriving over a year after Johnny Depp’s defamation trial against Amber Heard reached its exhausting conclusion, is the documentary equivalent of one of those aggregated “first reactions” articles. Emma Cooper’s three-part Netflix series Depp v. ![]()
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