Review: Tuner

Director:  Daniel Roher

Stars:  Leo Woodall, Havana Rose Liu, Lior Raz

There’s something acutely ironic about watching Tuner – a film in part concerned with abhorrent noise – with a modern middle-class Picturehouse cinema audience who’re too entitled to simply shut the fuck up. People complain about the teenagers in the multiplexes, but they’re saints compared to senior citizens and complacent couples who consider any public space an extension of their living room. ANYWAY, we’re here to talk about Tuner, the first solo narrative feature from established and Oscar nominated documentary filmmaker Daniel Roher, a crowd-pleasing drama-cum-thriller with a well-monitored romantic sidebar. A film that seems intent on currying favour with those who grumble that they don’t make ’em like they used to, and who have done so ever since Whiplash left cinemas.

We’re zigzagging across contemporary New York with Harry Horowitz’s (Dustin Hoffman) piano tuning outfit, ostensibly just the veteran jazz pianist himself and his spiritual nephew Niki White (Leo Woodall). Harry, bless him, is losing it. A doddering boomer with poor hearing, arthritis, dementia and a heart condition, it’s not long before he winds up in the hospital. With increasing medical bills, things don’t look good at all. Happenstance (and there’s a lot of happenstance here) provides Niki with an opportunity to make some cash on the side, when he interrupts Uri (Lior Raz) and his own gang of Eastern European nephews while trying to drill a safe. Niki – who has acute noise sensitivity and perfect pitch – can crack any combination safe with enough time and quietude. Uri’s offer of quick cash-in-hand work proves irresistible for a good lad trying to help out his lifelong benefactor.

It’s evident from the snappy script co-written with Robert Ramsey that Roher is a fan of a certain streak of snappy neo-noirs with punchy titles (think The Driver, Thief etc.) that centre misunderstood males with a maverick expertise and some inner turmoil, but Tuner ultimately sits somewhat apart from such pictures. It feels a little too gentile for them. Still, it plays the familiar notes dutifully, even skillfully. But with all the edges shorn away, Tuner feels just a little too clean and calculated. It’s likely unintentional, but from the jump it feels strangely self-satisfied, as smug as a Dustin Hoffman dashboard bobblehead. Roher shares Damien Chazelle’s confident proficiency, and the work here is undeniably tidy, but it’s a little too efficient, a little too sure of its self, which makes some of the deficiencies all the more glaring.

The whole story is predicated on a number of coincidences, most of which orbit Niki’s blossoming romance with conservatory piano student Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu, dialling up the sweetness). Woodall and Liu have some pretty effortless chemistry, and Roher has the nous to capture this in some casually long ‘oners’ like he’s aping Howard Hawks, and this is some of the best and least showy work here. It helps us through some of the more convenient passages (of course there’s a piano in the hospital corridor!) and sappier dialogue moments. It doesn’t quite patch over how hard the movie leans on Uri and his cohorts as ‘funny foreigners’, however, and efforts to preempt this criticism in the text only further draws our attention toward it. And, for a movie about aural sensitivity, there are a few questionable decisions. Niki’s safe-cracking under pressure could have played out with some genuine suspense with the reverent silence that’s demanded of it… so why clutter these sequences with Will Bates’ itchy and unpleasant EDM score? See also the frequent efforts to assault us whenever Niki encounters uncomfortable dissonance. It gets old fast.

It might sound like I’m eager to naysay here, and honestly most of Tuner‘s faults are fairly minor, but there’s a cocky assuredness about the presentation that’s amorphously off-putting, enough to encourage nitpicking. Nitpicking like the use of Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” as jazzy backdrop for Niki’s deepening life of crime – a little on the nose, no? This lamentable desire to undo Tuner springs from the movie’s own misplaced assurance that it’s got everything sewn up. Ultimately, it’s a perfectly ordinary, perfectly adequate little crime drama, with splashes of ingenuity and overall polished presentation. Roher does a sharp, piercing job of escalating the stakes when he needs to, and makes sure we don’t miss the overarching criticisms of our debt-inclined, subcontracting societal ills. Free healthcare for all!

I feel like a grouch as this will almost certainly be a popular, well-liked outing, one that’ll probably garner a more robust reputation once it finds a casual streaming audience if it doesn’t grab immediate word-of-mouth support. Maybe you can blame the shitty audience I saw it with. But I think this is a solidly fine slice of deeply-predictable and pedestrian entertainment, one that’s a little desperate to be thought of as slick, slick slick. Roher’s done better and he’ll do better I’m sure.

And there’s nothing wrong with being fine. With being the little fish for a while.