Posted on Thu, May. 15, 2008
Not perfect, but not just empty ‘Noise’
By Gary Thompson
Philadelphia Daily News
Daily News Film Critic
Philadelphia native Henry Bean probes the mind of the zealot once again in the oddball indie "Noise."
Bean made a splash a few years ago with "The Believer," featuring Ryan Gosling in a career-making role as a neo-Nazi whose anti-Semitism had surprise roots in his own Jewishness.
It was a strange movie that slowly revealed the character's "hatred" of Jews as a fear of the power and pull of his own religion, a subtle argument drowned out by the screaming headline of Bean's own premise: Jewish neo-Nazi!
"Noise," believe it or not, is a stranger movie still. Tim Robbins plays David Owen, a New Yorker who develops a toxic reaction to unnecessary, provocative noise. His prime target is the car alarm — a device that's probably never prevented a theft, but that's certainly prevented many a restful night's sleep.
Owen, driven to distraction by the absurdity of the car alarm, mounts a vigilante campaign (he calls himself The Rectifier) to disarm and disable them, becoming a minor celebrity who attracts the wrath of the city's law-and-order mayor (William Hurt, wearing what appears to be an intentionally horrific hairpiece).
There's a dark side to Owen's fanaticism, though. The Rectifier becomes increasingly destructive, and Owen dangerously obsessed, risking his career and his marriage (to Bridget Moynahan) with his fixation.
The increasingly unhinged Owen is up all hours, stalking car alarms, or reading G.W.F. Hegel for philosophical insight into oppressive nature of unwarranted noise.
And perhaps Hegel could address the existential mystery at the heart of this wacky drama: Why is a guy who hates noise living in Manhattan?
Maybe it doesn't matter. As a last resort, Owen spends a few days in the country and ends up getting in a fistfight with the operator of a leaf blower.
"Noise" wavers between the creepy and the funny, with Robbins well-cast (but not well-coiffed) as the creepy-funny Owen. Its tone is hard to pin down, and so is the narrative — Owen takes up with an Eastern European intellectual who helps him find legal and political channels for his dark energy, leading to potential redemption, but also to a three-way during which the women wax philosophical about areas that get waxed.
There are also narrative false starts and dead ends, and, after all of it, an unconvincingly tidy resolution. So "Noise" isn't perfect.
On the other hand, I'd hate to live in a movie world that didn't make room for weird, imperfect little movies like this. *
Produced by Henry Bean, Susan Hoffman and Meike Kornrumpf, written and directed by Henry Bean, music by Phillip Johnston, distributed by ThinkFilm.
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