Vaunted Hollywood supporting actor Peter Saarsgard, in a rare lead role here, is usually a master of understatement, so it’s no surprise he would be cast in this ambitious but ultimately one-note wonder of a film about an NYC house tuner. What’s a house tuner, you say? Well, it’s sounds very much like the kind of pseudo-scientific quackery that would only be profitable in hipster zones of New York or perhaps Portland, Maine.
Saarsgard’s character, Peter Lucien, is essentially an academic, but his theories about sound and its psychological impact don’t get much love from the folks in academic circles. So he’s struck out on his own as a sound consultant who tests the sonic equilibrium in people’s living and workspaces using simple tuning forks. We’re made to believe that he can then come up with solutions for equalizing the ambient noises in people’s domestic lives: if the symphony of sound one’s home appliances makes is dissonant or in a grating key, this will have adverse physical and psychological consequences for the dwelling’s inhabitant.
One of Lucien’s most prominent clients is (Rashida Jones), who is a workaday fortysomething who wakes up every day with fatigue and headaches and enlists Lucien (who had an article written in the New Yorker about him, no less) to try and sort out the atonal disharmony or her kitchen and living area. (As it turns out, she needs a new toaster.) Of course, because Saarsgard is a fine actor, he’s able to bring a serious edge to Lucien’s character and his work, no matter how ridiculously crackpot it all is ( “Your life is in C minor, the sound of resignation!” he bellows to Jones at one point).
As we learn, there’s eventually some interest in the professional world in Lucien’s theories, but these shady businessmen are more interested in ripping off gullible but moneyed New Age-y types, while Lucien steadfastly sticks to his convictions that his research should be taken seriously by the academic community. And it’s really Jones and Saarsgard’s acting chops that render The Sound of Silence even remotely convincing on any level.
Somewhere lying dormant in this film about a tortured genius is a sophisticated satire on the frivolous values of the young-ish upper-middle-class NYC bourgie contingent. But sadly it ends up a predictable example of the American indie crowd trying to fashion their low-rent version of something like A Beautiful Mind but without enough conceptual imagination to transcend tired Hollywoodian melodrama tropes (The House Whisperer, perhaps?) and move beyond this ultimately witless affair that seems, ironically, tone-deaf in so many ways. Not recommended.