MEDIOCREMOVIE.CLUB
  • Reviews
  • Side Pieces
  • Shane of Thrones
  • Podcast
  • About
  • Archives
  • Game of Thrones Fantasy

Sound of Metal

3/10/2021

1 Comment

 

A-
​3.50

A drummer suddenly loses his hearing.

Directed by Darius Marder
Starring Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cooke, and Paul Raci
​Review by Jon Kissel

Picture
​In Sound of Metal, protagonist Ruben Stone repeatedly stresses to doctors and counselors and his girlfriend Lou that he’s trying to save his life.  A drummer in a screechy punk duo with Lou, Ruben’s hearing is rapidly deteriorating and is making his day-to-day in a sonic profession impossible, but his actual existence is not in danger.  The problems in his inner ear aren’t going to spread to his liver or his kidneys.  He’ll continue in a new state, but for Ruben, his life is what it is right now extended into the future.  More touring with Lou, eking out an existence in hopefully bigger and bigger venues, but if it’s dive bars forever, that’s fine, too.  However, to quote Al Swearengen, ‘announcing your plans is a good way to hear god laugh.’  Darius Marder’s incredible debut film is a beacon of bittersweet hope in a period of disruption.  It places Ruben as a would-be immovable object against the unstoppable force of entropy and unpredictable events, and invites him to consider that the life he’s trying to save could instead be a bridge to a better one.  For a lot or reasons, Sound of Metal, one of 2020’s best films, arrives at a perfect time.

Riz Ahmed, an actor who’s broken out on TV critical circuits with The Night Of and should deservedly have the same experience on the film equivalent, plays Ruben as a twitchy embodiment of flailing desperation.  Both he and Lou, played by Olivia Cooke and her oddly-dyed eyebrows, are recovering addicts, which further feeds into a sense of precarity as every movie about addicts must.  When Ruben’s hearing starts to go, the panic that Ahmed lets spread across his face and his body is informed by years of prologue.  His and Lou’s band, Blackgammon, is playing a kind of music that I do not get and would run screaming from if they started playing in a bar I was drinking at, but this is what they do now and it seems to be working.  If Ruben can’t play, maybe the relationship tanks and everything he’s worked for, including his sobriety, dissolves.  Ruben is a disagreeable and impatient character who has few follow-up questions and a lack of insight about his problem, but Ahmed is so insistent and assured that he brings the viewer along with force of will.  His energy is so aggressive that one would get exhausted by him and just go along with whatever he wants, as several caretakers and doctors do.

When the rush to cochlear implants falls apart due to lack of funds for an uncovered procedure, Ruben’s left to no alternative but a kind of commune for deaf people.  Here, he meets group leader Joe (Paul Raci), the one person who Ruben will not be able to bowl over.  The serene Joe is the entry point into deaf culture and potentially a new kind of living for Ruben.  The commune runs a school where Ruben could teach music and learn sign language alongside the kids.  It’s in a forest, implying life would be slower and have more rural stakes.  Ruben would be around people who know exactly what he’s going through and can demonstrate that living as a deaf person is far from the death sentence Ruben fears it to be. 

The conflict at the commune arises from philosophical debates around cochlear implants, a debate I remember being introduced during the first several seasons of ER.  Dr. Benton’s son was born deaf, and, being a hotshot surgeon, he immediately wanted to hand his kid off to another surgeon and fix the problem.  As a teenager, this sounded like the exact right solution, but the show introduced the idea of the deaf community’s resistance to cochlear implants as a kind of erasure.  A culture, specifically a language, has necessarily arisen around deaf people.  Put cochlear implants in everyone and the culture disappears.  What I don’t remember ER doing is actually demonstrating what the effect of an implant would be.  Marder’s technical achievement in Sound of Metal is to sonically put the viewer in Ruben’s head, letting them hear what it’s like as he gets tinnitus and then muffled incoherence, and ultimately, what the implant sounds like.  That kind of uncomfortable distortion from an impressive technology that doesn’t seem to be there yet is the most effective argument against implants, and Joe, in perhaps the film’s best scene, makes a pretty good one, too. 

​After Ruben gets his implants, his continued existence at the commune is impossible.  All the beautiful interactions and moments he was having with the kids, the voiceless yet lively ASL banter around the dinner table, the exercises that Ruben never fully bought into, it all has to go away.  A tearful Joe explains that, in so many words, the Daredevil mythos is kind of correct.  The subtraction of something can indeed open up new sensory avenues, and while Ruben isn’t going to get radar powers, he could gain the ability to quiet himself and experience, in Joe’s words, a moment of stillness.  Ruben has plainly traded his drug addiction for a codependent relationship with Lou, and he’s just as single-minded in getting back to her as he might’ve been for heroin or meth.  Joe is advocating healing that single-mindedness, and Ruben’s just not there yet.  Life is frequently about moving from one sustaining moment of joy or peace to another, thus allowing the mundane or the irritating in between to be tolerable, but Ruben is still stuck in his old, dead life that can now only provide frustration and failure.

Ruben tells Joe that he can’t handle the idea of being insignificant or small, and he can only imagine a musician career as the way to avoid that.  He also implies that he’ll be less-than as a deaf person, and neither is something that Joe has much time for.  One of the most impactful and aspirational characters in recent film is Louis Garrel’s character in 2019’s Little Women, who effortlessly bats away Jo March’s insults about how he’ll be forgotten.  He knows exactly who he is and where his talents lie, and he’s perfectly content with them.  The search for grandeur or some kind of validation is a road to nowhere.  It’s only a quirk of insurance policy that forces Ruben to take the intermediate step at the commune.  A more generous health care plan would’ve put implants in his head without any of the just-as-vital work that Joe attempts to do with him.  Ruben has to be cured of his fear of insignificance.  Marder and Ahmed and Cooke and Raci are people who live in public, and so is Garrel for that matter, but the movie they’ve made together emphasizes a dignity available to everyone if they’ll only let themselves be still and find the kind of peace that aspirational thinking makes impossible.  After a year where the world had its own restrictions and recalculations forced upon it by external factors, some changes to our collective thinking before the next big factor rolls in might be appropriate, instead of sticking to the loud, abrasive, hand-to-mouth path we’ve been chugging along on.  A-
1 Comment
Lane
3/11/2021 11:03:31 am

“The Sound of Metal’s” real accomplishment is that it takes at least three film tropes—the ‘overcoming a disability’ trope, the overcoming an ‘addiciton’ trope, and the ‘hopeless young love’ trope—any one of which could have easily de-railed the film into bogs of sentimentality or Sean Penn-eque levels of over-dramatization in the hands of less skilled actors and producers, and treats each with a respect and restraint that, in total, creates a relatively quiet, introspective film that packs a hard-earned emotional payoff in the end.

Riz Ahmed’s performance is getting heaps of well-deserved credit for his role as Ruben, the indie-heavy metal drummer who suddenly loses his hearing. Ahmed is able to display an emotional range in this role that should put him over the A-list hump, though good for him if he sticks with the more subtle indie roles that have made his career worth watching so far. The strength of the performance is in how Ahmed is able to take his character’s rage, anger, joy, and nervous freneticism and keep it within a tightly controlled range. One can’t quite take their eyes off of him while he’s on screen, but his acting never outperforms the scene or the other actors. It’s a controlled performance that could have become very melo-dramatic in other hands.

Darius Marder’s directing is likewise restrained, juxtaposing differing landscapes—urban and country—that provide the visual and, most importantly, aural backdrops for Ruben’s plight. One is reminded that, while the film’s rural settings are quite a bit less hectic than the urban landscapes where Ruben and Lou tour with their band, they are no less quiet. I credit Marder for helping the audience fully see how much is lost when a critical sense like one’s hearing begins to betray you.

Olivia Cooke also turns in a good performance as Ruben’s emotionally conflicted girlfriend, Lou. Her confusion and terror are fully identifiable in the film’s first third. It’s a credit to both Ahmed and Cooke that those first scenes were so emotionally complex that the couple’s ill-fated reunion in the film’s third act simply couldn’t awe in quite the same way. And Paul Raci gives a strong performance as Ruben’s mentor at the halfway house where he finds refuge and where the film’s middle act spends its time.

This review has highlighted the acting because this film is an actor’s film, but the message that Marder conveys is deeply humanist. While I generally dislike films that have some kind of “lesson” at the end (except for Pixar films), “Sound of Metal” is an exception. The message is so subtle, and so deeply spiritual, that it transcends any cheap morality lesson of simply “accepting who you are.” Perhaps one of the most pernicious lies of 21st century identity politics is that any of us ever fully accept who we are. The best most of us can ever do in life is find the still moments where we can simply be. That, as Raci’s character “Joe” teaches us, is “the kingdom of God.”

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Authors

    JUST SOME IDIOTS GIVING SURPRISINGLY AVERAGE MOVIE REVIEWS.

    Categories

    All
    2017 Catch Up Trio
    80s
    Action
    Adventure
    AI Trio
    Author - Blair
    Author - Bobby
    Author - Bryan
    Author - Chris
    Author - Cook
    Author - Drew
    Author - Joe
    Author - Jon
    Author - JR
    Author - Lane
    Author - Phil
    Author - Pierce
    Author - Sean
    Author - Shane
    Author - Tom
    Best Of 2016
    Best Of 2017
    Best Of 2018
    Best Of 2019
    Best Of 2020
    Best Of 2021
    Best Of 2022
    Comedy
    Culture Clash Trio
    Denzel Trio
    Documentary
    Drama
    Foreign
    Historical
    Horror
    Internet Docs Trio
    Mediocrities
    Movie Trios
    Musical
    Podcast
    Romance
    Round 3.1
    Round 3.2
    Round 3.3
    Round 4.1
    Round 4.2
    Round 4.3
    Sci Fi
    Season 10
    Season 2
    Season 3
    Season 4
    Season 5
    Season 6
    Season 7
    Season 8
    Season 9
    Shorts
    Sports
    Thriller
    Western
    Women In Men's Worlds

    RSS Feed

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014

    Click to set custom HTML