Legally enforced pseudo-apologies from public figures are common enough: the mock sorrow for “any offence caused”, the breezily worded commitment to “setting the record straight” etc. But Johnny Depp and Amber Heard have gone in for the high-risk strategy of recording an elaborately deadpan spoof apology whose purpose is to satirise the very people they’ve been forced to placate. The result is very bizarre and uncomfortable: Russell Brand brought off this kind of pseudo-apology a bit more successfully when he released a quasi-mea culpa online after the Andrew Sachs affair with a picture of Stalin in the background.
It’s the equivalent of too-cool-for-school Year 12 students sneeringly saying “sorr-eeeeee!” to the headteacher and it says to the viewer: these uptight idiots with their tyrannical laws think they’ve won. They won’t understand they’re being mocked … but our fans will get the joke.
Heard drolly refers to Australia as an “island” (Australians think of it as a continent) and praises its “treasure trove of plants, animals and people” – the “people” involved may be less than delighted to be grouped together in that airy way. While she speaks, Depp fixes the camera with an ultra-ironic heavy-lidded gaze. When Depp speaks, it is with a weird fake-sincere breathiness. “Declare everything when you go to Australia …” he murmurs, almost inaudibly.
It is a very strange performance from them both, perhaps especially Depp. He has only recently staged a comeback with his performances as Donald Trump and the gangster “Whitey” Bulger. But here the irony has gone awfully wrong.
