Sound of Metal (2019, Darius Marder) (Patreon)

40/100

Another film that I originally bailed on (at TIFF '19, in this case) but felt obligated to rewatch in full when it landed among last year's consensus critical favorites. Sure enough, both of the aspects that bugged me during its first 47 minutes—running time back then was listed as a whopping 140; Marder subsequently trimmed it, though reports suggest that it actually ran only 130 or so at TIFF—turned out to be dealbreakers. One of them is sort of personal and will likely inspire a lot of tangentially related philosophizing, so let's tackle the movie's formal cowardice first.

Actually, before I get to the main issue, here's an equally emblematic moment that doesn't involve sound design. When Ruben first arrives at the shelter, Joe instructs him to arise at 5am and sit alone in a small room furnished with nothing except a desk, a chair, and writing materials. He's to sit in complete stillness for as long as he can manage, furiously write whenever he can't. A real challenge for this guy, whose first impulse is always to take some sort of action, even if it's self-destructive. I happen to consider Joe's approach to Ruben's problem ridiculous (perhaps because I'm a similar personality type to Ruben), but ignore that for the moment. The movie counsels stillness—it's clearly on Joe's side—but Marder himself can't be still, even for the duration of one scene. He's terrified of alienating a potential mainstream-arthouse audience, so we spend barely any time at all trapped with Ruben as he struggles to do nothing. Instead, Ruben immediately pounds a donut into fragments, freaks out for roughly one minute, and then we're off to the school he sometimes visits. Any halfway-decent filmmaker would have sought to make this experience at least slightly uncomfortable for the viewer, rather than serving up visual shorthand and speedily moving on. 

Similarly, a potentially great movie about this subject would have shifted permanently into Ruben's soundscape—and without subtitles, either (until he learns to sign, at least). Force us to fully inhabit his new, disorienting world, rather than merely providing us with an occasional brief reminder. Let us be as initially confused as he is when Lou suddenly gets up in the middle of a strained conversation, because we, too, can't hear her phone ringing from across the RV. This is more or less the same complaint that I lodged against Room, in which Abrahamson whiffed the opportunity to make Jack's first view of the outside world overpowering; here, Ruben's cochlear implants, when finally activated, should register as a shock to us as well as to him, with the distortion supplanting an hour of maddeningly muffled noises and complete silence. Instead, we just think "Ooo, that's not right." (I'm also 99% confident that people who get implants are warned that they won't regain their full former auditory range or anything close to it. Ruben being caught off guard by that is patent screenwriter's bullshit.) Indeed, the best thing in the movie—apart from Amalric, who makes a ruefully compassionate meal of his tiny role—is Ruben "drumming" on the metal slide, sending rhythmic vibrations to the kid up at the top. Even in that instance, Marder makes sure to provide us with the actual sound as an unnecessary contrast. I felt constantly coddled.

So that's one reason I made my exit at TIFF—it was already quite clear, 47 minutes in, that Sound of Metal would be too formally timid for my taste. But I also sensed a therapy movie emerging, even though I saw only the first scene at the shelter (before Lou leaves). Sure enough, we eventually get a heapin' helpin' of what I consider to be self-help nonsense, e.g. Joe firmly telling Ruben "You don't need to fix anything here." ("Except for yourself" is left implicit, but that's the smallest of favors.) Again, I'm willing to concede that this is mostly me being unreceptive to the ostensibly life-affirming message on offer—I spent pretty much the whole middle hour rooting for Ruben to get the hell out of that nightmare, which is clearly not the intended reaction. So I was surprised and pleased when he ultimately chooses to get the implants, rejects Joe's offer to stay on at the shelter, and seeks to resume some semblance of his previous life. An ending that suggests this won't be remotely easy is dandy by me, and I appreciate the ambiguity of the film's final moment, which sees Ruben choose silence without necessarily implying that it's a permanent decision (though I suspect that's the inference many people will make). Better that than a Hollywood-cheesy shot of Joe looking up to see Ruben standing across the road, ready to be welcomed back where he belongs.

Still, the whole "deafness is not a handicap" stance (explored at length in the terrific 2000 documentary Sound and Fury) has me once again wrestling with where I believe hearing loss does or should fall on what I now recognize as a continuum of norm-deviance. What I think doesn't matter, since I'm not deaf (yet!). But the debate fascinates me, because I am colorblind, and embracing that deficiency, or arguing that it's not a deficiency at all—just a different way of perceiving the spectrum, no less valid than the standard way—would never in a million years occur to me. Give me a cheap and painless means of fixing my defective cone and I'll do it at the first opportunity; there are few things I'd love more than to see red and pink and purple as most humans do (even though the world looks totally normal to me unless I invert colors on an Ishihara plate and see the number pop out of nowhere). So deaf people who have no desire to hear used to seem crazy to me. The difference, I now recognize, is that being colorblind rarely if ever becomes a crucial part of one's identity. I subscribe to r/colorblind on Reddit, just because it's sometimes fun to commiserate with fellow protans about maps we can't read or whatever, but that's pretty much the extent of my investment in any sort of community. It's just not something I dwell on. Most days I forget, to be honest. I've never seen colors any other way and can't imagine an alternative.

Told ya I was gonna wander well astray of the movie if I launched into this. Anyway, point is, my personal experience with a very minor (if occasionally irritating) genetic anomaly colors, shall we ironically say, my perception of other anomalies that aren't actually comparable. At one time, I'd have assumed that anyone with autism (this would have been prior to the concept of an autistic spectrum—one that I may very well be on the high-functioning end of!; I have some mild Asperger-ish traits) would welcome having that "affliction" "cured"; today, I recognize that making someone neurotypical, should we ever know how to do so, would arguably alter them to such a degree that they'd scarcely be the same person. A frightening thought that I certainly never entertain vis–à-vis my color vision. I have a harder time getting there with deafness (and blindness), which to some degree still strike me as a straightforward...well, handicap, I guess. Ruben removing his implants because he's repulsed by the harsh, discordant simulacrum of sound they provide seems tantamount to me wearing special contact lenses that show the world in greyscale, rather than enjoying the colors I can see. It's not quite the same, admittedly, since I have no memory of what colors are supposed to look like. But I still involuntarily recoiled a bit at what's clearly meant to be a choice that we'll applaud, or at least understand. I kind of understand. But there's also a first-reel-Ruben part of me that sees it as giving up.