Sound of Metal
Darius Marder (2019)
Ruben Stone (Riz Ahmed) is one half of Blackgammon, a heavy metal duo. He’s a drummer; vocalist Lou Berger (Olivia Cooke) is Blackgammon’s other half – Ruben’s other half too. Their home is a trailer, in which they travel from one gig to the next. Ruben suddenly starts to lose his hearing. He visits a doctor (Tom Kemp), whose tests reveal the extent of the deafness: Ruben has no more than 20-30% hearing in either ear and further deterioration will follow. The patient wants his problem fixed, and fast: when Dr Paysinger explains that cochlear implants may help, Ruben wants them instantly. Paysinger tells him it’s not as simple as that and how expensive the implant treatment would be. He advises Ruben to eliminate his exposure to loud noise and to return in due course for further tests. Ruben ignores the advice and continues to perform but not for much longer. He’s also a recovering drug addict – clean for four years. Lou contacts his sponsor, who arranges a place for Ruben in a shelter for deaf addicts.
Darius Marder is in his mid-forties but Sound of Metal, which he wrote with his brother Abraham and Derek Cianfrance, is his first dramatic feature. (Marder has also directed a full-length documentary, Loot (2008), and worked with Cianfrance on the screenplay for the latter’s The Place Beyond the Pines (2012).) The film’s USP is its sound design (by a team headed by Nicolas Becker): the audience, much of the time, experiences what Ruben is hearing – or not hearing. As well as being technically ingenious, this, of course, gives the viewer-listener a more immediate sense of Ruben’s frightening new world. Marder maintains a commendable balance between describing what it’s like for a person – an everyman – to lose their hearing, and what this means for someone who makes their living playing in a rock band. Riz Ahmed, who’s in virtually every scene, makes Ruben’s situation thoroughly absorbing. Yet Sound of Metal is less than the sum of its parts, and those parts are the usual staging posts in life-changing-trauma drama – the main character’s incredulity and vehement denial of his plight, apparently coming to terms with it, backsliding, etc.
Set in present-day America, Sound of Metal premiered at Toronto in 2019. It was completed shortly before Riz Ahmed and Bassam Tariq made Mogul Mowgli, in which the Ahmed protagonist, Zed, is also struck down by a debilitating medical condition. Zed is suffering from an autoimmune disease – so might Ruben be, though Dr Paysinger says the hearing loss could equally be the result of prolonged exposure to noise. Darius Marder doesn’t return to the cause of the problem; he concentrates instead and entirely on Ruben’s experience of deafness. As an actor, Riz Ahmed has a fast motor; with his sharp features and wiry physique (bulked up for this role), his default mood on screen is alert verging on jittery. He’s the ideal interpreter of antsy, angry Ruben. He gets good support from Olivia Cooke, who’s notably effective showing Lou’s reactions to bolt-from-the-blue adversity and, especially, from Paul Raci, as Joe, who runs the rehab shelter.
Joe is a Vietnam veteran who lost his hearing in the War and struggled with alcoholism for years afterwards. The counselling given by his church-sponsored unit aims to deal with problems (as he explains this to Ruben, Joe makes the appropriate gestures) inside the head rather than the ears. It’s addiction, not deafness, which Joe sees as a disability. He gives Ruben a daily, early morning task – to write down his thoughts and get used to doing so, to sitting still, and to silence. Though he prefers to communicate in sign language, Joe needs mostly to speak in his exchanges with Ruben. Rarely raising his voice, Paul Raci creates a figure of authority and humour. His tranquil presence perfectly counterbalances Riz Ahmed’s. Ruben’s renewed determination to reclaim his former life – he sells his drums and the trailer to raise funds for cochlear implants, then begs Joe to loan him money to buy the trailer back – eventually forces Joe to admit defeat. After telling Ruben that he sounds like an addict still, Joe asks him to leave the community. As Ruben exits, Joe is still quiet but his face and breathing express his distress. Paul Raci got this role largely because he’s fluent in American Sign Language (he was raised the hearing son of deaf parents). Now seventy-three, he’s been a jobbing actor for decades. The quality of his work in Sound of Metal leaves you baffled that his breakthrough has taken so long to arrive.
During his time in the shelter, Ruben makes friends with Jenn (Chelsea Lee), another member of Joe’s group, and attends classes run by Diane (Lauren Ridloff), a local ASL schoolteacher. His interactions with the kids in Diane’s class, including teaching them basic drumming, are the most upbeat parts of the film, though shadowed by the certainty that Ruben won’t settle down for long. When he first arrives, he wants to continue living in the trailer with Lou while attending Joe’s sessions but house rules require that he move into the shelter without her. I didn’t get why this ended all contact between them, since Ruben has access to a computer, which allows him to find out what Lou is getting up to in his absence. He discovers that she’s working on a new kind of experimental music in Paris. After surgery for cochlear implants, Ruben flies to France to seek her out.
This is the climax but also perhaps the weakest part of the film. His implants enable Ruben to hear more but the sound is badly distorted. Lou is living in Paris with her songwriter French father, Richard (Mathieu Amalric); Ruben arrives at Richard’s house to await Lou’s return. Richard delivers a near monologue, from which we learn that he and his wife broke up years ago, that Louise’s American mother took her back to the US and later committed suicide, that Richard has always been suspicious of Ruben but now realises that he made Lou happy. A lot of information: Ruben might well at this stage ask, as screen people often do, why are you telling me this? If he did, the honest answer would probably be to make it worth Mathieu Amalric’s while appearing in the film. It’s Richard’s birthday; at a party that evening, he and Lou perform a duet of one of his songs, which Ruben can’t hear properly. He and Lou spend the night together but he leaves quietly next morning, while she’s still asleep.
Ruben walks out into the city. The ambient sound is disorienting. He sits on a bench, removes his implants’ processors and listens to the silence. In the film’s last shot, Darius Marder keeps the camera close up on Riz Ahmed for quite some time. Ruben’s face seems to relax, suggesting that he’s finally reconciled to his loss of hearing. This ending is only momentarily effective; by the time the closing credits roll, you’re wondering if, after the failure of the cochlear implants, Ruben can really have achieved a personality transplant instead. I watched Sound of Metal on Amazon Prime Video and its claustrophobic design may well gave greater impact in a cinema, where the relatively captive audience can feel more on the same wavelength as the main character. For this home viewer, Marder’s film, despite its tough subject, impressive soundtrack and strong performances, is proving to be quickly evanescent.
17 April 2021