Sound of Metal (2020)
dir. Darius Marder
Rated: R
image: ©2020 Amazon Studios
Even if Sound of Metal weren’t one of the best, most emotionally pulverizing cinema experiences of the year, the outstanding lead performance from Riz Ahmed would be reason enough to praise the film. The English actor/rapper/activist’s incredibly rich performance comes down to the level of interiority that Ahmed is able to convey to us. Through nuanced looks and gestures, most often conveyed with no words at all, Ahmed accomplishes with his character, Ruben, one of the most noble goals of the arts: the ability of the audience to truly see the world through someone else’s eyes.
Ruben Stone is a drummer in the two-piece metal band Blackgammon. His romantic and artistic partner, Lou (short for Louise), plays guitar and sings. A recovering heroin addict, Ruben is faced with a life-upending situation when he suddenly and almost completely loses his hearing due to the nightly abuse of Blackgammon’s metal shows.
It’s a simple setup – almost high-concept: the elevator pitch might be, “Metal drummer loses his hearing overnight and must face radically changing his life in order to adjust.” But the careful attention to detail and emotional complexity that first-time director Darius Marder and his co-screenwriter Abraham Marder put into the picture make Sound of Metal a deeply moving experience, much more so than that brief summary might suggest.
Darius Marder achieves this with unconventional stylistic methods which he employs in order to thrust his audience into Ruben’s world. Through brilliant sound design, the film lets us hear the world as Ruben hears it. The soundtrack shifts between a standard movie soundscape and the muffled, unintelligible one that Ruben experiences.
Marder’s film also includes closed-captioning – different from subtitles, in that closed-captioning includes written descriptions of sounds other than only dialog, so that deaf people can get a more complete sense of what they’re watching – which is an inspired choice. I’ll admit that I was a bit confused in the opening moments of the movie. I thought the digital screening link I was watching had a glitch that made the subtitles appear by default. A quick Google search by my wife confirmed that the included closed-captioning was intentional.
It might be tempting to call the decision to include these closed-captions gimmicky, but it’s a very effective tool when Ruben begins a new chapter in his life at a deaf halfway house for addicts. Ruben, who understands zero sign language, like most of us, is completely left out of the conversations of his new housemates. The hearing audience is left out, too, as Marder doesn’t close-caption the American Sign Language (ASL) dialog. We must sit in silence, unable to decipher what the speakers are saying, just like the deaf community is forced to do in the hearing world.
Marder and Sound of Metal engage with the deaf community in a way that is very rare in movies. Actor and musician Paul Raci, a hearing person whose native language is ASL because both of his parents were deaf, has a supporting role as Joe, the administrator of the halfway house where Ruben begins his new life as a deaf person. The cast members playing the residents of the home all come from the deaf community. The scenes that take place in a school classroom, where Ruben begins learning ASL alongside the children of the home, are heartwarming and life-affirming. How humans connect to one another, no matter the language they use, can be a transcendent thing to see on screen.
The film raises issues that I myself was exposed to when I took two semesters of ASL to fulfil my foreign language requirement as a college undergraduate. As part of the course I read the book Deaf Like Me, and I gained an appreciation – one I had never been forced to confront – for the deaf community’s argument that being deaf isn’t a handicap. They see themselves as part of a unique community, one with a rich language and distinct culture.
It’s a hard transition for Ruben – someone from the hearing community who finds himself abruptly dropped into this new culture – and the film doesn’t shy away from that fact. Ruben is desperate to have cochlear implant surgery so he can get back to playing and making music with Lou. The film presents Ruben’s journey in an elliptical style that recalls Marder’s work on the screenplay for the 2012 crime drama The Place Beyond the Pines, which he co-wrote with Ben Coccio and Derek Cianfrance, the latter of whom has a story credit for Sound of Metal.
English actress Olivia Cooke is superb in the limited screen time she has as Lou. The understated writing from the Marder brothers for the movie is at its best when Ruben is asked how long he’s been clean. Four years his is response. He’s then asked how long he’s been with Lou. He again answers with four years. In that one brief exchange, we know all we need to about their relationship. Lou’s heart is broken for Ruben – Cooke and Ahmed play the couple as passionately in love – but at the same time she seems a little too ready to move on with her life without Ruben.
The aforementioned Raci is excellent as Joe, the voice of the deaf community in the film. Joe lost his hearing because of a bomb blast while serving in the Viet Nam war. An emotionally devastating scene late in the film, when Ruben talks to Joe about the cochlear implant surgery, allows both actors to shine.
Deaf actress Lauren Ridloff – Connie on The Walking Dead TV series – plays a teacher who gives Ruben his first ASL lessons. French actor Mathieu Amalric also makes the most of his two scenes as Lou’s estranged father, Richard.
Sound of Metal belongs, though, to Riz Ahmed. The actor shows an overwhelming emotional sensitivity in every scene in which he appears, and for the record, that’s almost every single one. The last shot of the film – which I can’t describe in too much detail, because it would be a mortal movie sin and I would surely invoke the wrath of the movie gods if I were to spoil this emotionally complex moment – is transcendent. I can say that it’s a shot of Ahmed’s face. The conflict and ambiguity about Ruben’s future that is present on Ahmed’s face in this last shot is incredibly powerful.
Sound of Metal is a movie that leaves you, as the credits begin, with no easy answers and a host of questions about where Ruben will end up in a year, or five years, or ten years after that last shot. It achieves another marker of really good art: it brings the characters to life in such a way that they take up residence in your mind.
Why it got 4 stars:
- Sound of Metal packs a hell of an emotional wallop. Empathy in entertainment is just about the most noble thing I can think of (especially right now), and this movie puts that front and center. It also has the added benefit of richly drawn characters, an immersive environment, and a story that seeps into your bones.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- The only thing that held this back from being a 4.5 star rating for me were a few plot contrivances that are really only there for the convenience of the story. Early and throughout the film, it is made clear how strapped for cash Ruben and Lou are. But when Ruben needs to fly to France all of a sudden, it’s no problem. A few other money issues I don’t want to get into too much detail about also rang a little false to me.
- I’m trying really hard not to spoil too much about this movie. The sound design is incredible, particularly late in the film, after a big change happens.
- I read somewhere once (it might have been in the ASL courses I took in college) a description of deafness attributed to Helen Keller: “Blindness cuts us off from things, but deafness cuts us off from people.” Sound of Metal does a fantastic job of representing that truth.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I saw this before its release through an advance studio screener link. Sound of Metal opens in select theaters on 11/20, and will be available on 12/4 with an Amazon Prime Video subscription.