BEFORE: I'm back after a five-day break, which was not a break at all because I was working every day. One day at the basketball games and four days at the theater, one was the big star-studded premiere of "Now You See Me, Now You Don't". Then the documentary festival started, and the place was packed, I had no idea so many people have come around and started watching docs now, but they sure seem to be hot these days. I've been coming home late (or early, technically) and exhausted - one night I fell asleep at 3 am and woke up at 1 pm, that's a solid 10 hours of sleep, but I needed it. But then I had just a couple hours to eat and get dressed before I was back there in the afternoon for another night of docs.
Last night there was a documentary about Oscar Isaac, so it was another star-studded affair and I added another "Star Wars" actor to my list of people I've seen or met, so that's always great. No need to bug him for his autograph, because I already have it. Now, somehow, I've got a whole weekend now to watch some movies and catch up on TV, so let's get to it. Speaking of "Star Wars" actors, it's Riz Ahmed's weekend.
Paul Raci carries over from "Sing Sing". Yes, November's half over and I've only watched five movies, but really that's right where I want to be.
THE PLOT: Punk-metal drummer Ruben begins to experience hearing loss. When a specialist tells him his condition will rapidly worsen, he thinks his music career - and with it his life - is over.
AFTER: This is a film that managed to get six Oscar nominations, and it won two, for Best Sound and Best Editing. Paul Raci, who carried over from "Sing Sing", got a Best Supporting Actor nom and Riz Ahmed got a Best Actor nom, but neither won - Ahmed won an Oscar the following year, but it was for making a live-action short.
I've been trying to get to this one for a while, for personal reasons - a few years ago I realized I was losing my hearing, at least in one ear. I made an appointment with an audiologist and confirmed that, but I was sent to a hearing aid specialist who kept touting the best hearing aids, which apparently are made in Sweden, and they were very out of my price range. Yes, we have medical insurance but that only goes so far with this sort of thing. Later, when the pandemic was starting to ease up, I tried again and went to the Eye & Ear institute at Mt. Sinai, they sent me to doctors who wanted to do an MRI and do corrective surgery because they were pretty sure it was just one little bone in my ear that had fallen out of place and they could cut me open and put it back into place, on an outpatient basis, but any surgery also costs hundreds of dollars - but also there was a 2% chance that the surgery could not work, and instead cause permanent hearing loss in that ear. I just felt that with my luck, I'd be among the 2%.
Finally I met with a specialist who said, "Well, why don't we just get you a hearing aid?" and that seemed to be the simplest and cheapest answer. The hearing aid worked for a while, but then I don't know if it got wet in the rain or something, but it would work correctly only when it felt like it, I tried to keep it clear of ear wax and dirt and such, but it's a device, and eventually every device fails in some way. So I should go get it checked out again when I have time, or try to find a replacement hearing aid that will work a bit more consistently, in the meantime I try to position myself so my left ear (the good one) is closer to people who are talking. However it's problematic at work when I have to wear a walkie-talkie to speak with the projection booth, and that has to go in my good ear, so then it's harder for me to hear other people in the room with just the right ear.
A couple months ago, I started to experience hearing loss in the left ear, also, and really everybody sounded like they were underwater, or maybe that I was. Plus I was experiencing pain in my left ear, which was a new wrinkle, so went back to Mt. Sinai to get another audio test. The audiologist said I couldn't get the test because I had too much wax obstructing my ear canal, so she sent me down to another doctor to get that wax cleaned out, only it turned out it wasn't wax at all, but a small piece of foam that usually covers my walkie earpiece. Oh, so that's where it went. They sucked it out of my ear and the pain went away, and I could hear better out of that ear again - I must have pulled the earpiece out of my ear but the little foam piece remained, and so when I got home I must have jammed the foam further in using a Q-tip, that made a little bit of sense. So once those medical bills are paid maybe I can go back, like over the holidays or something, and try to get a new hearing aid.
My point is, this hearing loss thing is very relatable to me, so the film hits home for me. My main concern when I found out I was close to half-deaf in one ear was, how am I going to continue to work in the film industry? How could I continue to transcribe scripts, talk on the phone, check the sound levels on movies being projected, etc? Well, so far so good, if I need to talk on the phone I use headphones and if I need to hear someone at work I just take the earpiece out of my left ear and ask them to repeat what they just said. I'm really no good at parties or family dinners, when sounds are coming at me from different directions and without sound in both ears those directions are rather hard to determine. BUT, I smile and nod a lot, and later on I can probably figure out what they were talking about before.
Really, Ruben's story is also my story, if you just replace playing the drums for a heavy metal act with filmmaking with, and his heroin addiction with my love of beer floats. It's still OK for me as long as my hearing doesn't get much worse, like I haven't felt the need to learn sign language just yet, but that day may come in the future. Or I'll have to learn how to read lips, that's a skill crucial for people in animation anyway, knowing the different mouth positions and the letters they represent. But really, this film is a very simple story - a man loses his hearing, meets a bunch of other people in the deaf community, and (gradually) comes to term with his disability. Can we still use the world "disability"? We lost "handicapped" a while back because it seemed too perjorative, and "handicapable" never caught on as an acceptable substitute. They'll probably come after "disabled" next because it still feels negative, when we get to "differently hearing-perception based" we've probably gone too far.
There are problems for Ruben because he needs to hear to do his job, and he's in a band with his girlfriend and they live in an RV together, out on tour. If he can't hear he can't communicate with her, heck he shouldn't even be driving the RV if he can't hear sirens or traffic alerts or railroad crossing signs. I think deaf people are allowed to drive, but I'm not sure how that all works. But if he can't communicate with her, how can they continue as a couple, let alone perform on stage together? He's also a former drug addict, so how can he go to meetings if he can't hear what his sponsor is saying, I mean he can talk to the group but it's very tedious if everybody has to write everything down for him to read.
His sponsor finds Joe, a recovering alcoholic who lost his hearing in Vietnam, and lives as part of a rural deaf community. Joe offers Ruben a place to stay for a few weeks while he comes to term with his hearing loss, funded by a local religious group. Ruben is not religious, but his girlfriend persuades him to stay, and he teaches drumming to a bunch of deaf kids, they can't hear the drums but they can probably feel the vibrations and understand different rhythms. But Ruben is also secretly using the internet to keep track of his girlfriend, and he learns she is performing music in France without him. He then sells their RV to pay for cochlear implant surgery, with a plan to fly to see her and borrow money from her father to buy back the RV in a few weeks.
There's a lot left unclear by the end of the film - was the cochlear implant surgery successful? If not, will Ruben's hearing improve over time, or will he have to learn to hear the world a different way? When he leaves his girlfriend at the end, is he planning to go back to her, or is he planning to return to the deaf community and find a new role there? Can he learn to find solace in silence, as Joe suggested? Normally I would hate so many loose ends at the end of a film, but here I kind of have to accept them, because Ruben has a future, he just hasn't decided for sure what it is or who and what it will involve. At least he's at a crossroads where several different things are possible, and I know those are maddening, but also if you don't know where you're going, then any road will take you there. I've been in that situation myself, really you just have to pick a path and then stay on it as long as you can, you can always find another path later on.
So yeah, it's a simple enough film, but sometimes in the simple things you can find echoes of greater things, here it's questions like "What do I do next?" and "Who can I be, since I can't be that guy any more?" and "Where should I go now that things are different in some way?" Any answers would probably feel inadequate, so that's probably why there aren't any, but still, those are some great questions to ask.
Directed by Darius Marder (writer of "The Place Beyond the Pines")
Also starring Riz Ahmed (last seen in "The Reluctant Fundamentalist"), Olivia Cooke (last seen in "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl"), Lauren Ridloff (last seen in "Eternals"), Mathieu Amalric (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Domenico Toledo, Chelsea Lee, Shaheem Sanchez, Chris Perfetti, Bill Thorpe (last seen in "Clear History"), Michael Tow (last seen in "Unfinished Business"), William Xifaras (last seen in "Infinitely Polar Bear"), Rena Maliszewski (last seen in "The Holdovers"), Tom Kemp (last seen in "My Best Friend's Girl"), Jeremy Lee Stone (last seen in "Creed III"), Hartmut Teuber, Hillary Baack, Joe Toledo, Adam Preston, Jonathon LeJeune,
RATING: 6 out of 10 BlackGammon t-shirts
