Things Will Never Be That Way Again

Sound of Metal a film by Darius Marder.  With Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cook, Paul Raci, Lauren Ridloff.  *****

I almost stopped watching Sound of Metal during the first five minutes.  I’m not a fan of heavy metal and didn’t want to spend two hours listening to what I heard in those early minutes.  I didn’t need to worry, because the music didn’t continue.  If I had stopped, I would have missed one of the best movies I’ve seen this year.

Ruben (Riz Ahmed) and Lou (Olivia Cook) are musicians in a band of their own, she on guitar and vocals, he on the drums.  They’re also a couple; they live in a huge Airstream, and travel from gig to gig that way.  And though their life on the road doesn’t continue, seeing the way they lived was fascinating.  Despite being tattooed all over his torso, Ruben is a health fanatic, starting the day with squats and pushups and making a couple of dreadful looking smoothies for him and Lou.

What we soon discover is that Ruben is rapidly losing his hearing.  The fits of losing it come on suddenly, and are terrifying; one of the fascinating aspects of the film is that we experience his hearing loss in the soundtrack, so that when he can’t hear something we can’t either, at least part of the time.  He runs out on Lou in the middle of a gig, goes the next day to a drugstore and a hearing center, where he tries to get help (and finds his hearing is down to 20% of normal capacity).  He has Lou call someone who seems to be their counselor, and that person finds someone to help them.  They take off in the Airstream toward an unnamed locale.

There they meet a man who, for me, is the center of the film.  His name is Joe (Paul Raci), and he’s the organizer and spiritual center of a deaf community, where he can help Ruben adjust.  When Ruben hears that he needs to stay there alone, without Lou, he immediately bolts.  It isn’t, we suspect, just that they love and support each other, but that they have been vital in one another’s recovery, and that Ruben can’t imagine giving up his old life.  He wants to go back on tour, and just pick up on cues from Lou, but once they’re out in the real world he can’t cope.  He has to accept his situation and head back to the deaf community, where he not only has to be without Lou, but give up the keys to his airstream and cell phone.

Joe identifies Reuben immediately as an addict, as he is too; he lost his hearing during the Vietnam war, and subsequently lost everything else in his life to alcoholism.  They have a twelve-step group in the community, and Joe makes it plain that they are there not to work on Ruben’s hearing, but on his psychological adjustment.  Everyone in this community—which has people of all ages and genders—has a task.  Reuben’s first task is to “learn to be a deaf person.”

There’s a fascinating scene early in his stay when Ruben has taken it upon himself to do repairs around the place, and Joe stops him, saying, “You don’t need to fix anything around here.”  He’s noticed Ruben is an early riser, and gives him a task, which is the same thing Joe does every morning.  Joe will have coffee for him at whatever time he gets up—they settle on 5:00—and Ruben will then go into a small room where he’ll spend the early hours.

What Joe wants is for him just to sit there.  If he can’t do that he’s allowed to write, but he has to keep the pen moving, and he’s allowed to write just words, not drawing or doodles.  Above all he has to stay in the room.  If he has trouble with that he can come find Joe.  Ruben has already insisted he’s not religious and is not interested in religion, but Joe has given him a spiritual discipline, which is obviously difficult for him (he tries to destroy the room on the first morning, and definitely destroys a donut), but he persists.

He seems to be doing well, but his addiction—which shows up as a wish to return to his old life—persists.  He has no phone, but sneaks off to the center’s computer and looks for information about Lou.  Eventually he concocts a scheme to get cochlear implants, which are extremely expensive, also go against the ethic of this facility, which Joe has stated clearly.  “Everybody here shares in the belief that being deaf is not a handicap. Not something to fix.”  Reuben doesn’t accept that premise.  He finds a way to get the money, and has the implants.

That leads to the most powerful scene in the movie, his final confrontation with Joe, who is deeply disappointed, to the point of being teary eyed, with what Ruben tells him.  He calls him on it clearly, saying that what he sees before him is an addict.  Ruben expresses an essentially nihilistic viewpoint: “What does it matter? It just passes. Yo. If I disappear, like, who cares? Nobody cares, man. Seriously. Yo, and that’s okay. That’s life. That’s life. No, for real. Okay? It just passes. It just fucking… fucking passes.”

Joe doesn’t argue with that, but has a different perspective.  “I wonder, uh, all these mornings you’ve been sitting in my study, sitting, have you had any moments of stillness? Because you’re right, Ruben. The world does keep moving, and it can be a damn cruel place. But for me, those moments of stillness, that place, that’s the kingdom of God.”

Ruben goes in search of Lou, who is actually in Paris, where her father lives; we meet this man and get more of their backstory.  Reuben is ready, he thinks, to take up their old life again (though he sold the airstream to get the implants, something he doesn’t mention to Lou), but it is obvious, in his moment by moment life, especially a party at Lou’s place, that the implants are far from perfect, and the next day, when some church bells ring we hear the sound of metal in a rather jarring way.  The movie is open-ended, but there’s a suggestion at the end that Ruben sees for a moment what Lou has been trying to teach him.  He can limp along with his implants and pretend things are the way they once were, or he can face his life as it actually is and find some beauty in it.

At a moment when we’re all wishing to get back to the way our lives used to be—a state that doesn’t exist anymore, and never will again—I found this movie deeply inspiring.