Tuner

Ten for ten! We've seen ten consecutive new movies (no intervening classics, though this is mostly happenstance) and each one of the ten was good. While Tuner is likely to get lost in the shuffle as Obsession and now Backrooms mow down the box office, we should not lose sight of a film that is brilliantly constructed and executed.

The Barbarienne said this to me about a trailer she had seen, "It looked like a movie."

It's sort of weird that we can, many of us anyway, identify that there is something different in these current flicks that make them feel like movies unlike the "slop" we've been getting, but there is very clearly something there.

Tuner is one of those movies. It's a real movie populated by real characters where each scene sets up something or pays off an earlier setup. The cinematography and lighting isn't going to ignite your toes, maybe, but it communicates well and doesn't feel canned.

It's a living work of art!

The story opens with our protagonist, Niki (Leo Woodall, Nuremberg, "The White Lotus") driving his crotchety old not-actually grandfather around (played by 89-year-old Dustin Hoffman—the role he was born to play!) to tune pianos. Niki, who has a hyper-acute hearing disability, does most of the work, listening to the notes and tuning them with fine sensitivity while rich, dumb piano owners try to bribe him to fix the toilet or the cable or whatever.

He and his wife (longtime character actress Tovah Feldshuh, Cheaper to Keep Her, Terror Out Of The Sky and a zillion other things) act like Niki's parents, down to Hoffman trying to fix up Niki with Ruthie (Havana Rose-Liu).

Ruthie's a bit of a bitch. But—and here's where character transcends politics—this is in the days leading up to the culmination of her life's work, scoring a job with a big-deal composer, and Rose-Liu plays the character sensitively and appealingly. She's not really a bitch so much as under a ton of stress, and in a weird position since she's had a kind of tunnel blindness regarding anything outside of her work.

So she knows she's being weird, and she knows she's got issues, so instead of being some kind of "strong independent woman" icon, she's just a human being. And she's attracted to Niki's gentle nature and inherent technical prowess—he has perfect pitch and an ear and mind for hearing and recalling music—while not wanting to be distracted from her course.

It gets so much easier to write a story when you don't have to worry what each character signifies in some narrow political sense.

Anyway, Harry has health problems which are characteristically self-inflicted, then he and Marla end up in some financial trouble which are also characteristically self-inflicted, and Niki finds himself using his special hearing talents to crack safes.

OK, this is utter nonsense.  Safes don't really work that way anymore, and if they did, you could use a hearing enhancer. But that's fine. A lot about this movie feels old-fashioned, and not to its detriment.

The hyperacusis is both his super-power and his super-weakness, kind of like Daredevil, except that Niki really can be brought to his knees by a smoke alarm, an airplane, an airhorn, and a gunshot.

Point is, he ends up getting sucked in to safecracking, which works great right up until it doesn't. When it doesn't, his gangster friends have no problem using his weaknesses to get back at him.

The movie ties up the things neatly that should be tied up neatly (the caper aspects) and leaves the things that should be messy (the human relationship aspects), and does so in a way that makes one feel hopeful.

This editor on this movie acted like every second he shaved out of it got added to his own personal lifespan—there is no wasted motion here. It has a story to tell and it tells it. It's the first fictional feature of Daniel Roher, the director and co-writer, who won an Oscar for his documentary, Navalny, but he directs with complete confidence that his charaters and story are going to carry the audience.

Though this movie is mostly suspense and tension, there are a couple of scenes of violence, the most graphic of which is also perfectly apt on a thematic level.

A great soundtrack with solid supporting music, I thought the weakest aspect of the music was the original compositions the main characters are presumed to have composed. But then I realized that we weren't really hearing the full compositions and were mostly seeing the bombastic, theatrical parts. The Boy didn't notice, so it's probably just me.

Overall, though, I'm relieved to see that there are people running around who still get what a movie is supposed to be, and can scrape together the money to actually make one. With the (relatively mild) violence warning in place, I'd consider this another general recommend.