Film Review: The Sound of Silence
Tyburski | IFC Films
By Erik Nielsen
Manhattan, a borough known for its inability to sleep and constant noise, a silent retreat might be the least bit likely but all the more necessary. Thanks to Peter Lucian (Peter Sarsgaard), the manic hero of Michael Tyburksi’s directorial debut The Sound of Silence, he may just have the next best thing. A self-proclaimed “tuner”, that steps into your house and appropriately adjusts the acoustics of your home so you can have a quieter and zen-like home life.
We follow Sarsgaard’s character, a music theory graduate, into his clientele’s homes. “Thanks for tuning my toaster,” they say, “Radiator sounds great, now I can sleep.”. Even recognizing that someone's refrigerator is at an E-Flat but should be a G. It’s the type of playfulness and wistful attitude about the mundane you’d expect to find in a Wes Anderson movie or even one of David Lynch’s and this is when the film is most at peace with itself. The director isn’t brash or bombastic about what Peter does either, it’s more of a subdued cool and paces itself slowly. Although I wish we got to spend more time with his clients, and paid more attention to his process. It’s a marvelous invention but one that isn’t given it’s fair share of craft.
Tyburski | IFC Films
After a story he publishes about his work appears in the New Yorker, Peter is given the chance to work with a large corporation and garner new clients, but it’s about “Constance”, he says “not commerce.” He rejects a corporations buyout to incorporate his work into their “universal equilibrium” program and instead strives to have his work amended by the scientific community. For him, it’s about his peers recognition. A goal he obsesses over to his new protégé (Tony Revolori) who finds Peter to be a misunderstood genius.
Peter thusly begins to be stifled by Ellen (Rashida Jones), his newest client, who feels no different in her life after he's done his tuning to her home appliances. There’s a great bit when he asks her what side of the bed she sleeps on and then acts it out himself. So he decides to step into her office life which nearly breaks him because he can’t control the noise surrounding.
Later we see the music theory graduate double down on the theory part of is work, in a scene eerily similar to one from Mike Leigh’s Naked, where Peter begins to lay down his thoughts on the world to Ellen. A world, he claims, that is governed by a specific tuning in each city neighborhood, where our thoughts are altered because of the musical key, actually having little control over what we think and do and he's the only one who recognizes it. Ellen rejects this, as do his scientific peers and Peter is left embarrassed.
Tyburski | IFC Films
The film's concept is strange and foreign enough to hold your attention through the end but it doesn’t capitalize on his obsessions. It’s not just science he’s after, it’s grandeur. The tuner wants to be recognized for his “discovery”, so when he does begin to crumble and lose faith in his research, we needed a bigger explosion. Sarsgaard is a terrific actor and can communicate years of pain and anguish with a single, teary-eyed look like he’s done so many times before. But, that can also be incendiary and we needed more than the two-minute scene of him sadly, wandering around his apartment looking at all of his field notes to justify the first hour of the movie. If it was all a build-up to him being let down, a proportional reaction should’ve been filmed.
Instead, the film falls flat into its conclusion, as it hits familiar narrative beats, that Peter needed a healthy relationship to steer him into sanity and away from his work. I say nay, follow the rabbit hole, give us more tuning. Let him fight the big corporation that eventually steals his idea and let us look more into the process, that by the end of the movie seems reasonable and necessary for the 21st Century, where we’re constantly surrounded by noise.
