Hello Darkness, My Old Friend, I've Come to Talk With You…About The Sound of Silence

Peter Sarsgaard as Peter Lucian / IFC Films

THE SOUND OF SILENCE
(Michael Tyburski, USA, 2019, 87 minutes) 

Peter Lucian, the professorial-looking New Yorker played by Peter Sarsgaard in Michael Tyburski's debut, isn't a musician, a DJ, or even a Simon and Garfunkel devotee—he's a house tuner. Clients, who find him through other clients, tend to be skeptical at first, but once he identifies the noise that's causing their malaise, they become believers. Like a therapist, he doesn't just pinpoint the problem, he provides the advice they need to eliminate it.

Tyburski's feature film, an expansion of his 2013 short Palimpsest (also co-written with Ben Nabors), is filled with vintage recording equipment, just as Peter's life is filled with vintage recording equipment (in that sense, it recalls Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio, which revolves around a sound mixer). Peter records the sounds he hears and the conversations he has with clients. After each assignment, he pins a note on a map, indicating the location of the problem. The map serves as the basis for a paper he plans to submit to an academic journal. For assistance, he enlists Samuel (Tony Revolori, The Grand Budapest Hotel), his mentor's TA, to help him compile the data (the incomparable Austin Pendleton plays his mentor).

Rashida Jones as Ellen Chasen / IFC Films

Ellen (Rashida Jones) contacts Peter, because she's tired all the time. And it isn't because she works at a non-profit that helps the homeless. It's her apartment, or she comes to that conclusion after talking to friends (Alex Karpovsky plays one of them) who benefited from Peter's services. Ellen looks tired, too, though because Jones plays her, she does so quite attractively. Peter looks tired, as well, though the actor who plays him often does. The Sound of Silence is just that kind of picture. This is not a complaint so much as an observation about the lonely-people-in-the-city brand of art house film--soft-spoken, chronically under-lit--to which I sometimes gravitate, and this one certainly fits that bill.

Peter identifies Ellen's toaster as the source of her problem. She's skeptical it can be that simple, but switches out her old model for the new one he provides. A recently-single woman more haunted by grief than discordant sounds, Ellen gives it a few days, but when her fatigue fails to lift, she gives Peter a call. He decides to visit her workplace to see if that could be a factor.

In the meantime, she tries acupuncture, while Peter rejects an offer to apply his knowledge to a commercial venture that manufactures ambiance for hotels through serotonin-targeted lighting, fragrance, and sound. He wants to make the world a better place by removing obstacles from people's lives and not by manipulating consumers into making wealthy realtors wealthier. It makes him sound heroic, except he's also arrogant enough to think he's too good for anything except the oddball career he's carved out for himself.

Ellen is tired of being tired / IFC Films

As for Ellen, it doesn't seem completely coincidental that Jones would be drawn to this role. As an actress, she's never needed to lean on her father Quincy Jones's fame as a producer and composer, and yet Peter has more of a background in music than science. Once he explains that to her, you sense Ellen's interest growing (Jones's partner is also a musician: Vampire Weekend front man Ezra Koenig).

Unfortunately for Peter, his well-ordered world starts to fall apart as a result of their meeting. Accustomed to being right all the time, he finds out what it's like to be wrong, and he doesn't know how to deal with it. As he tells Samuel, "Typically, I know the solutions to a client's issues before I even arrive," but Ellen's apartment messes up his map, which messes up his research project, which messes up his ability to trust his ears and his instincts. And on a more personal level, his arrogance and rigidity ends up scaring away someone who could be a friend--if not something more.

But sometimes you have to hit bottom to see your life clearly for the first time. It's a relatable (if somewhat clichéd) sentiment, so it's too bad cinematographer Eric Lin shot the film's conclusion in such darkness that I could barely see what was going on. It will probably make more sense on a big screen, but even on a small one, more light would have gone a long way. There's an unintentional irony that a film so sympathetic to sound, from the flapping of birds' wings to the clomping of horse hooves, would treat light with such casual disregard, but it reflects Peter's dilemma: he's so focused on seeing the world in one way that he misses all of the things--including some of the most pleasurable--that can't be so easily defined.



The Sound of Silence is playing at the Varsity (4329 University Way NE).