Movie Review: Sound Of Metal (2019)

A drama about loss, Sound Of Metal bores into the psyche of one man confronting the sudden on-set of a life changing condition.

Recovering drug addict Ruben (Riz Ahmed) is a drummer for a two-person heavy metal band, supporting his girlfriend and lead singer Lou (Olivia Cooke). While they are on a club tour living and traveling in an RV, Ruben experiences sudden severe hearing loss. A doctor advises the hearing will not naturally come back, an operation to install implants would cost up to $80,000, and Ruben should focus on preserving the little hearing he has left. 

Through a friend's referral Ruben reluctantly joins a commune for deaf recovering addicts run by Vietnam War veteran Joe (Paul Raci), while Lou departs to Paris where her father lives. Joe encourages Ruben to accept deafness, learn sign language, and volunteer with deaf kids. Ruben does make progress, but he remains full of concealed anger and intent on securing funds for the operation to restore his hearing.

A story of profound misfortune, Sound Of Metal is one character's journey into the unthinkable. Director Darius Marder co-wrote the script with Derek Cianfrance, and keeps the focus on a far-from-perfect man pushed into yet another crisis. The film is intimate, sometimes frustratingly constrained, and powered by the coiled rage of a restless Riz Ahmed performance.

The abrupt onset of deafness is all the more devastating because Ruben's life was on the upswing. Clean from drugs and even smoking, on a successful club tour, and devoted to his true love Lou, the worst seemed to be behind him. Now the loss of hearing drops a boulder on burgeoning optimism. It's no surprise that denial is Ruben's strongest response, followed by fixating on a short-cut bring-back-the-past solution without researching the implications.

The script railroads Ruben into a long episode on Joe's peculiar commune, where accepting deafness and thriving anyway is the laudable goal, but the rules designed for addicts don't always appear conducive to dealing with recent trauma. Here Marder explores the difference between the silence imposed and the value of elusive meditative stillness, and the narrative loses its way. The second act is only partially successful as a foundation for a reintegration and reunion where reality and recognition start to take hold.

The sound design is superlative, conveying Ruben's hearing difficulties with stunning impact. The concert roar of aggressive drums and Lou's forceful vocals yields to the disorienting inability to hear, only for the consequences of cochlear implant surgery to throw another wrench. Within its limited scope, The Sound Of Metal achieves hushed immersion.



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Movie Review: The Sisters Brothers (2018)

A chase western, The Sisters Brothers features a character-rich tale of greed, science, shifting alliances, and plenty of killing.

In the American West of the 1850s, brothers Eli and Charlie Sisters (John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix) are assassins-for-hire doing the dirty work for Oregon-based industrialist The Commodore (Rutger Hauer). Brash younger brother Charlie is an expert gunslinger but also frequently drunk. The older Eli is more circumspect.

With the California gold rush in full swing, their next assignment is to catch-up with detective John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal), who is supposed to find and apprehend prospector Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed). Morris does find Warm on the way to California, but they become partners once Morris learns about Warm's chemical discovery. The Sisters brothers now doggedly chase down both men, and more surprises await when the pursuers find the pursued.

An adaptation of the Patrick DeWitt novel, The Sisters Brothers is an often engrossing western with a twisty plot. French Director and co-writer Jacques Audiard draws inspiration from classics like The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre (the greedy pursuit of gold subsuming everything else) and Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (the endless chase, here flipped twice), and adds spikes of humour and frequent shoot-outs to some visually magnificent landscapes.

The film's strength is drawn from four sharply drawn characters. In this story, the nasty cold-blooded assassins are the central protagonists. Eli and Charlie have a backstory fuelling their relaxed relationship with death, while an uneasy dynamic crackles between the two men. They actually rarely agree on anything, but they also always look after each other and combine their strengths to repeatedly get out of impossible jams.

Meanwhile, Morris is a thoughtful and soulful detective using his diary to chronicle his travels. An expert at finding men but with no interest in killing them, Morris has no difficulty finding Warm and sidling up to him. But the prospector is a shifty character and probably the smartest of the lot. A misfit and penniless chemist seeking a wild west fortune, he is a man with a different plan to get rich quick. And once Morris and the Sisters brothers find out what Warm is up to, all the agendas are shuffled. But greed is an all-consuming monster, tearing alliances apart as easily as they are forged, with the added misery of rapid physical and psychological degeneration.

The characterizations are boosted by interludes of short and sharp action, Audiard finding mixed success in seeking innovative ways to demonstrate the brothers' calculated bravura as they confront numerically superior enemies. Some of the nighttime scenes are brilliantly staged, while others are a muddle of indistinct shadows.

Small details round out The Sisters Brothers, mostly swirling around Eli. A small bug causes an inconvenient sickness; a middling but resilient horse becomes a precious companion; and a scarf from a long-ago liaison carries the symbolism of a life never to be experienced. Heartless gunslingers plagued the west, but they too were once men with hopes, dreams, and scars.



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