Sound of Metal

When I was in my early teens, I had a brief period in my life where I became obsessed with how blind people got along without the benefit of sight. I would make a blindfold and walk around for hours at a time trying to get by without my sight, even shutting out all the lights and showering in the dark, finding everything I needed without the benefit of illumination. This phase didn’t last long, but it did instill in me a great appreciation for those who have no choice but to live their life in a world without visuals.

While being unable to see creates a wide array of problems when navigating the world, being deaf can, in many ways, be just as challenging, especially for someone who wasn’t born that way but suddenly loses their ability to hear. In 2020’s Sound of Metal, we are introduced to Ruben Stone (Riz Ahmed), a drummer for an avant-garde metal band who suddenly finds himself with rapid hearing loss. This concept, originally titled Metalhead, focuses on how Ruben reacts to his new condition and how he just cannot accept being a part of the deaf community and takes some desperate measures to try and regain his hearing back. It’s a character study, but it is also a psychological study into what it means to be deaf and how people can either dwell on what they have lost or celebrate what they still have. This is an important viewpoint to examine, especially for someone who may be dealing with similar circumstances. 

The film doesn’t specifically point the blame on anything for why Ruben loses his hearing. When the symptoms begin, they are abrupt but not total. He still has some hearing, although it is muffled and distant. He is advised to try and preserve what little hearing he has left by avoiding loud noises, but as if he is in denial that his condition is serious and permanent, he continues playing in his band alongside his girl, Lou (Olivia Cooke). But without being able to hear, he quickly loses the beat and can’t keep playing. Lou wants him to stop performing, but he angrily insists that he can push through this. On top of her concern for his hearing, she is also afraid he may fall off the wagon and return to his former drug use. She, herself, struggles with self-harm, scratching herself when stressed. 

Through his sponsor, Ruben is introduced to a rural shelter for deaf recovering addicts run by a man named Joe (Paul Raci), a recovering alcoholic who lost his own hearing in Vietnam. This shelter requires total solitude from the outside world, meaning Lou cannot stay with Ruben nor can he keep a cell phone or computer to contact her. At first, he refuses, but she eventually convinces him to stay. While there, he is taught how to use sign language and to get used to the solace of a silent world, sitting in a room by himself with nothing but a notebook and pen in front of him. But he cannot get past the idea that there is an expensive surgery he could undertake that would fit him with cochlear implants, which may benefit him to a degree. Joe tries to help him understand that the people at this shelter do not look at being deaf as a handicap and that this obsession with the surgery is not only its own kind of addiction but is also detrimental to the emotional well-being of the other people at the shelter. 

There is no one perfect way to deal with the loss of something as vital as your hearing. Some people have a positive outlook on life and don’t let such a thing hold them back. Others turn bitter and angry, desperate to try and find some magic solution that will restore them to the way things used to be. They go through the stages of grief from denial to bargaining with everything in between. We see the latter with Ruben as he at first can’t accept what has happened to him, then later he is throwing a fit in the middle of the night, trashing his RV and waking Lou up with his violent outburst. He never quite gets out of the bargaining stage, though; not until the very end. Despite the best efforts of Joe and the many others at the shelter, he just can’t quite accept in his mind that this condition is permanent. Hearing has become his new drug, and he gets determined to get his fix by any means. 

What he ultimately discovers, though, is that cochlear implants, as expensive as they are, are not a substitute for proper hearing. They provide the ability to hear to a degree, but that sound is distorted, and the more sound there is around him, the harder it is to process it all. This is no fairy-tale cure that will allow him to be a drummer again. For some time after getting the surgery, he seems determined to make a go at it, but after visiting Lou in France, where she is visiting her father, he comes face to face with the realities of everything. Listening to her sing a duet with her father, it becomes clear that his days in music are probably over. On top of that, in his absence, Lou hasn’t been hurting herself, but his return, brief as it is, brings back those old problems with it. 

Riz Ahmed is one of those actors that I have seen in things before but never really paid much attention to. He’d been cast a lot as villains and terrorists for years while also popping up in more traditional roles that never really went anywhere. When Sound of Metal came out, people were still associating him with the previous year’s role he played in Venom or his part in the Star Wars film Rogue One. Those were the films that brought in big money and made him a familiar face to mainstream audiences. Sound of Metal proved that he was capable of more than just this marshmallow fluff and could command an audience all on his own. 

While there are other stand-out performances in this film, Paul Raci especially, Riz is often having to be the only one on screen and conveying the emotional turmoil his character is going through wordlessly. This is not an easy feat to accomplish. Ruben has some demons that he is battling and, even though we know otherwise, he feels like he has no one to help him through it. He grows to enjoy some of his experiences while at the shelter, including working with the deaf children in the school, but he also keeps himself emotionally distanced from them. He could have a good and fulfilling life working there; Joe sees this and offers him a job full-time. But he can’t get over the thought of restoring his hearing, and that ultimately puts an end to his time there. 

The sound department rightfully won an Oscar for this film. A team of sound engineers put together a sonic experience that is unlike anything I have ever heard in film. We go back and forth between hearing the world like an average hearing person and hearing the world like Ruben does, through a deep muffling gauze. Later, we will experience sound through the artificiality of the implants, and it will become obvious that not hearing at all is preferable. Even in the face of that, though, it will take more to convince Ruben of that. 

This film is one of the best I have seen at dramatizing the realities of someone pushed unwillingly into such a dramatic change in their lives. It’s a believable look at how someone so used to relying on their abilities to hear would react to having that suddenly ripped away from them. This is a powerful film that not only examines the limitations of such an inciting incident but also how we can be our own stumbling block to living a full and fulfilling life in the face of such an obstacle. We can’t always control what life throws at us. How we roll with the punches and what we learn from it can, and does, define who we are and how happy we are in our lives. When we last see Ruben, he is in the middle of a noisy city and he shuts off his implants, plunging himself into silence, a silence where he can simply focus on what’s right in front of him and not all the cacophony around him. In that silence, a little smile forms on his lips. 

Academy Award Nominations:

Best Picture: Bert Hamelinck and Sacha Ben Harroche

Best Actor: Riz Ahmed

Best Supporting Actor: Paul Raci

Best Original Screenplay: Darius Marder, Abraham Marder, and Derek Cianfrance

Best Film Editing: Mikkel E. G. Nielsen (won)

Best Sound: Nicolas Becker, Jaime Baksht, Michelle Couttolenc, Carlos Cortés, and Phillip Bladh (won)

____________________________________________________

Release Date: November 20, 2020

Running Time: 120 Minutes

Rated R

Starring: Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cooke, Paul Raci, Lauren Ridloff, and Mathieu Amalric

Directed By: Darius Marder