Lovely to see Dustin Hoffman on a big screen again in TUNER, almost 60 years after THE GRADUATE (Mike Nichols, 1967), and still bringing life, energy and intelligence to every moment he’s in. His scenes with Leo Woodall are reason enough to see the film. Hoffman, as an elderly piano tuner (Harry Horowitz), crackles, teases, loses the thread of his conversation, falls asleep in mid reminiscence. Woodall, as his orphaned apprentice (Niki White), says next to nothing, listens, humours him, ignores him, does his job, looks at him adoringly with those round puppy eyes of his. The film is smart about letting Woodall have the screentime necessary to respond to Hoffman, without dialogue but facially and physically, to show how at ease and loving they are together. It’s a wonderful portrait of intergenerational affection, which would feel out of place in what turns out to be heist film if it weren’t one of its central pleasures and narrative drives.
TUNER is a high concept film: NIki suffers from hyperacusis, a condition that makes his hearing so sensitive it’s destroyed his career as a piano virtuoso but which also means he can open any safe by hearing alone. When Harry falls ill and the bills piles up, Niki goes to work for some Israeli gangsters. The problem with the film is that it can’t quite decide on its genre, so we also get a comedy (there’s a running gag about rich clients treating the tuners as all-purpose handymen and asking them to fix everything from wifi to plumbing while ‘they’re at it’); The film is also a romance (Havana Rose Liu is the student composer who Woodall falls for) and a heist film; all pleasurable on their own.
TUNER also has really interesting overall commentary on Jewish culture with Jean Reno as the composer in search of the watches left by his grandparents killed in the Holocaust, the shiva for Dustin Hoffman’s character, the casting of Tovah Feldshuh as Hoffman’s wife – ie part of a history; the warmth and humanity of Hoffman and Feldshuh within a particular New York Jewish culture – then contrasted with the brutality of the Israeli gangsters. Ie. this is a film that has a lot, and it being a lot might be the reason why each of the elements feels not quite up to the best, but each is in itself a pleasure to see, and certainly the scenes with Hoffman are a delight. It’s the one section I wish the film had lingered on longest.
The film has perhaps the best sound design I’ve seen this year, allowing us to understand the soundscapes of the city, the contrast to Niki’s experience of it, and the drama that creates. The sound design is also very good at evoking perspective on that sound, types of sound, distance from source, etc. It’s brilliant work, beautifully orchestrated with the other elements by director Daniel Roher, whose first fiction feature this is. TUNER has some superficial similarities to BABY DRIVER (Edgar Wright, 2017), a much more successful genre piece which also makes brilliant use of sound. But as you can see from the above, they’re very different kinds of films. I loved seeing TUNER in spite of its faults.
