{"id":2588,"date":"2021-04-22T16:39:29","date_gmt":"2021-04-22T16:39:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2588"},"modified":"2021-04-22T16:39:29","modified_gmt":"2021-04-22T16:39:29","slug":"oscars-2021-sound-of-metal-and-another-round","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2021\/04\/22\/oscars-2021-sound-of-metal-and-another-round\/","title":{"rendered":"Oscars 2021: Sound of Metal and Another Round"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Last on my list of Best Picture nominees was Sound of Metal<\/em>. And I might just have saved the best for last. Riz Ahmed does career-best work here as Ruben Stone, a drummer in a heavy metal duo who suffers suddenly and catastrophic hearing loss which causes him to spiral despite the best efforts of firm but fair Joe (Paul Raci) at whose retreat for the deaf the middle part of the film is set.<\/p>\n

So, this is another small film. Small in the sense that Minari<\/em> is small or Nomadland<\/em> is small, in that it\u2019s about a handful of people and the intimate group of people around them. But it\u2019s also small in the way that The Trial of the Chicago 7<\/em> and Judas and the Black Messiah<\/em> aren\u2019t. This isn\u2019t righting any societal wrongs, or commenting on a troubled part of recent history. What\u2019s fascinating about Darius Marder\u2019s film (with input into the screenplay from Derek Cianfrance and Marder\u2019s brother Abraham) is both its window into deafness \u2013 and particularly sudden loss of hearing \u2013 and its fascinating depiction of a protagonist who consistently makes amazingly poor decisions but who never loses my sympathy.<\/p>\n

The evocation of deafness is absolutely stunning. Both in the sound mixing and the editing. Because deafness is impossible to evoke simply on the soundtrack. Certain scenes play like a weird looking-glass version of the nightmare scene in\u00a0The Artist<\/em>\u00a0wherein objects sudden create noises. It\u2019s the contrast between the kinetic movement in the frame and the precisely judged presence or absence of accompanying sounds that give these moments their profound impact. And Riz Ahmed \u2013 almost never off the screen \u2013 anchors the film with a commanding performance, which would make me sorry that he doesn\u2019t stand a chance as Best Actor this year, were it not for my now unshakeable faith that it\u2019s only a matter of time.<\/p>\n

Paul Raci (possibly controversially, a hearing Child Of Deaf Adults rather than a deaf actor) underplays beautifully and there\u2019s not a trace of sentimentality in his relationship with Ruben. And it\u2019s greatly to the film\u2019s credit that when that relationship is sabotaged by Ruben, he leaves and we never see Raci again \u2013 but nor does this feel untidy, like a loose end that needs to be tied off.<\/p>\n

Less successful is Ruben\u2019s relationship with his girlfriend Lou. Olivia Cooke does fine work in the first third, but she\u2019s Jennifered off to sleep on a porch while the boys have their drama. The way their relationship shifts in the final act feels true and poignant however and the final shot is completely devastating. Richer than Minari<\/em> or Promising Young Woman<\/em>, less purely entertaining than Chicago 7<\/em> but more grounded, just more interesting than Nomadland<\/em> and far more cinematic than The Father<\/em>, this barely noses ahead of Judas and the Black Messiah<\/em> as my favourite of the nominees.<\/p>\n

I also watched Thomas Vinterberg\u2019s Another Round<\/em>, which for a while I thought would top the lot. It\u2019s a marvelously dark, richly comic tale of middle aged angst, in which four schoolteachers use the (apparently real) writings of a crackpot psychiatrist to justify being permanently pissed at the job. Naturally, this can\u2019t end well, but the sly way in which they egg each other on, and the sheer pleasure of seeing them almost lift out of the skins at home and at work is delightful. But this morbid tale demands a grim ending, and just as I was waiting for the final savage twist of the knife, the storm clouds lifted. I gather that a tragedy in Vinterberg\u2019s life led him towards a more life-affirming ending for the tale, and while the final sequence is just that, it feels like the central conceit has been neither carried to climactic excess nor brutally undercut as reality seizes control and wrests the fantasy away from our heroes. A very near miss, then, but well worth investigating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last on my list of Best Picture nominees was Sound of Metal. And I might just have saved the best for last. Riz Ahmed does career-best work here as Ruben Stone, a drummer in a heavy metal duo who suffers suddenly and catastrophic hearing loss which causes him to spiral despite the best efforts of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25,11],"tags":[13,526,19],"class_list":["post-2588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-the-cinema","category-culture","tag-oscars","tag-oscars-2021","tag-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-FK","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2588"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2591,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2588\/revisions\/2591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}