Sound of Metal
**I also wrote about “Sound of Metal” as part of Film for Thought’s “Ultimate Choice” blog on Best Picture of 2021 Contenders here.
It’s a brutal emotional journey when you basically have to start over in your life. In 2008, I basically had to do a hard reset on myself. I was already in the middle of a heightened physical awareness because I had been hospitalized with pneumonia and a collapsed lung in September 2007, but I also had emotional issues that began bubbling to the surface, having negative impacts on friendships and relationships. What made my journey a bit easier was that it was one I had already recognized I needed to go on- circumstances just accelerated it. When you do such a reset, what was a comfort, or even a driving motivation, for you is, more times than not, just not comfortable anymore. Where you go from that point on will determine how at peace you are moving forward.
“Sound of Metal” is one of the most intimate, experiential films about that journey I have ever seen. Writer-director Darius Marder has created a film that follows his protagonist, Ruben, through every emotional beat, and mental challenge, of this situation, and has us experience it as Ruben experiences it. In a year where filmmakers have seemed to be at their best in delivering films that make us flies on the wall of their character’s struggles and lives, “Sound of Metal” takes it to a level few other films have done.
Ruben (Riz Ahmed) is a drummer in a band he’s in with his girlfriend, Lou (Olivia Cooke). They’ve been together for about four years, and both have emotional (and literal) scars in their past- he was a drug addict, and she’s self-harmed. One morning, after a gig, Ruben wakes up, and he cannot hear anything. He makes an immediate appointment with a doctor, and he finds that nearly 80% of his hearing is gone. He wants to get back to his regular life, so he wants to just get the implants and move from there, but his doctor is trying to explain that that’s just not his only option. After a few days of high stress and anxiety between he and Lou, a friend points Ruben to a commune for deaf people run by a man named Joe (Paul Raci). Joe will take Ruben in, but he has to be prepared to trust in Joe’s process, which is not so much to get Ruben back to where he was, but to point him in a new life where his hearing impairment isn’t a hindrance to his life.
The past can be a security blanket for us. It can be a comforting place for us to go back in our minds, and remember how things used to be before our life went to Hell. Holding on to the past can be healthy, but if something goes so wrong we have to rewire our brains to accept a new reality, the past is something we need to grow out of. It’s interesting that Ruben and Lou both have traumas in their lives prior to the events in this film that they had to get past; sometimes, those previous traumas can prepare us for further emotional turmoil, or we get surface comfort from things that don’t allow us to grow from those traumas in a healthy way, leading to further turmoil. As we watch the film unfold, it feels like Lou is in the first category, while Ruben is in the latter- his relationship with Lou, and his drumming being surface comforts covering up the pains he drown himself in drugs in when he was younger. They worked (he’s four years sober, he tells the doctor), but he also can’t imagine his life without those comforts. Seeing him move from the place he’s at when he first loses his hearing, to the place Lou got to naturally (as we glean from their scenes at the end), is one of the most riveting stories I’ve seen from a movie this year. Ahmed gives one of the year’s best performances, and it’s because of how natural and authentic his work is that the emotions we experience in “Sound of Metal” are so palpable.
It would not surprise me to learn that Marder and his writing collaborators- including Derek Cianfrance (“Blue Valentine”) and Abraham Marder- were working from a true story; the film is extremely tactile and authentic in a way that feels autobiographical. Marder’s directorial approach reminds me of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” in a way, in how it thrusts us into Ruben’s experience of his deafness using a brilliant sound design, and working our way up to subtitles whenever the characters at the commune sign based on Ruben’s ability to understand. This is nothing we haven’t seen before out of filmmakers, to be sure, but “Sound of Metal” puts us so far into Ruben’s experience that it feels like the only way this film would work without being maudlin. The pain and rage Ruben lets out after he’s aware of what happened, and before he goes to the commune, is as believable as if this were a documentary. A scene he has with Joe after Ruben makes choices that he thinks are in his own best interests are as palpable as when we confront a friend with an painful discussion about our future together. And the last scenes make it clear, without words, that Ruben is starting to see things clearly for the first time. We can’t fault him for how long it’s taken him to get there, though; just be grateful he arrived at that moment.
As filled with painful emotions as this is, I can see “Sound of Metal” being a movie I return to often over the years. As I’ve gone on my own emotional journey, I find that stories of flawed people, sometimes struggling to find their way, are a welcome catharsis, and as emotionally satisfying than any blockbuster can be. I cannot wait to see it again.
