“Tuner”

Tuner is a terrific — if problematic and paradoxical — film. Directed and co-written by Daniel Roher (in his fictional feature film debut after having previously helmed documentaries), the movie stars Leo Woodall as a young piano tuner, Niki White, with an acute hearing condition that has rendered him hypersensitive to sounds. As a result, he always wears earplugs and often dons protective earphones over them. White works with Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman), an aging jazz pianist and aficionado who long ago turned to tuning pianos in an effort to pay the bills. Harry and his wife, Marla (Tovah Feldshuh), essentially serve as surrogate parents to Niki, who develops a fledging romance with a gifted piano student named Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu). Their relationship — initially frosty and mutually wary before becoming genuine and serious — springs from Niki’s perfect ear for piano keys and virtuosic sense of the instrument, even though he no longer plays it due to his hearing condition (called hyperacusis). In other words, Niki and Ruthie share a musical passion that attracts them yet also complicates their relationship.

There is a basis here for a very pure and earnest relationship drama that explores character and human sensitivity in significant ways, and Tuner often functions in that manner. But Tuner also serves as a contrived crime drama that constantly threatens to undermine its core strengths yet — amazingly — never truly does so. Already struggling for money and failing to pay his health insurance premiums, Harry then suffers a heart attack (conveniently, just after he meets Ruthie for the first time and encourages Niki to walk her to class). By this time, Niki — while tuning a rich man’s piano — has met the members of a small, shady security company that also caters to high-end New York clients. Niki’s perfect ear translates into unlocking safes as well, and these security workers are willing to pay him ample money — in cash — if he will help them unlock safes more quickly as they seek to pilfer little valuables along the way. Naturally, these associations will imperil Niki along with his blossoming relationship with Ruthie.

The problems here are multiple. While Tuner is an independent film (its distributor is Black Bear, an independent studio), Roher’s decision to interweave a sensitive and ironic romance with a tawdry crime saga results in Hollywood-style melodrama, as if he felt that audiences simply would not prove entertained enough without commercial conventions, without something in the way of “action” in space. (Make no mistake, though: Tuner is certainly not an action movie.) Moreover, that crime saga results in a gimmick of a late plot twist that stretches credulity, and that gimmick then leads to another gimmick, creating a compounding effect of gimmickry. Ordinarily, such narrative decisions would either sink a film or seriously weaken it.

A related problem resides in how the narrative melodrama affects the casting. The soft-featured Woodall is perfectly cast as an unassuming, introverted piano tuner hesitantly making his way into an unexpected romance, but he seems too thoughtful, skeptical, and intelligent to accept the risks of burglary, even if he needs the money. Thus perfect casting in the lead role becomes problematic to a certain extent.

Additionally, all the vault-twisting burglary leads to montage scenes that — while slickly edited and executed — seem glib, easing the tension that emerges from the intimate character scenes instead of building it. Then, too, Tuner sometimes seems to serve as a tribute to Hoffman, now nearing his ninetieth birthday. The dashboard of Harry’s van features a Dustin Hoffman bobblehead. (It ostensibly represents a bobblehead of the character himself, but how many anonymous people have their own bobbleheads?) Harry’s date of birth, mentioned in the film, is exactly the same as Hoffman’s (August 8, 1937). And we see at least one photograph of Hoffman in his younger days. Casting Hoffman as Harry in this supporting role certainly works, but one receives the sneaky sense that the filmmakers are simultaneously paying homage to Dustin Hoffman, the acting icon, which can also prove problematic.

Technically, meanwhile, Tuner offers both strengths and doubts. Roher shows strong skill with montage (although, as mentioned previously, it may sometimes be ill-chosen), and his heavy reliance on closeups largely works for an intimate drama such as this one. Still, greater visual composition and use of mise-en-scène would have provided a better balance and enhanced the movie’s sense of place (set in New York, shot in New York and Toronto). That said, Tuner provides resonant and intricate sound mixing, as distinct piano keys indeed come to life.

The film’s real strengths lie in the quality of its acting (especially Woodall and Liu, who seem like real people really interacting with one another) and its sustained and quiet scenes, as opposed to the movie’s crime narrative gimmickry and stylistic flourishes. Yet Tuner manages to brush off, or override, its myriad problems and paradoxes, rendering them rather irrelevant in the final analysis. For what works here really works, and at least the criminal aspects are entertaining enough. Add a painfully affecting climax and an ironically bittersweet coda, and the result is a “good/very good” movie — a pleasantly refreshing cinematic surprise and an island of old-fashioned human sensitivity. While not as pure and unmitigated of an experience as it could have been, Tuner still proves quite worthwhile.