2007, USA
Comedy, Drama
In case you had not heard, New York City is a noisy place. Many of the city's residents have considered taking a sledgehammer to a car's incessant alarm at one time or another. In Noise, writer/director Henry Bean (one of the penmen behind Basic Instinct 2) presents a character who breaks through the apathy that leaves most people with the usual headaches.
Tim Robbins plays David Owen, a man with a comfy job and a comfy house with a stunning and talented wife, but a man who cannot shut out the grating noises of the city. As he begins to release his anger on the alarms that rattle his train of thought, his revenge becomes an obsession. When he moves from letting air out of tires to breaking into cars in order to tear apart the alarm hookup, he decides -- to the detriment of his aforementioned comfy life -- to devote his life to the ears of the good people, and labels himself the Rectifier.
As he leaves a calling card with a Unibomber-like image and destroys offending autos to the music of the alarms, the film is almost comical. Almost. Tim Robbins is too smart for this. His character's philosophical excuses for his actions present nothing of substance. William Hurt as the freakishly red-haired mayor is so much of a caricature (à la his painful portrayal in A History of Violence) that he trips past funny on his way to annoying.
Owen attempts to explain his aggravation to his wife as a feeling of impotence over the situation. As he gains a mental shot of Viagra, his power is subtly portrayed by the sexual bravado required to satisfy two lovely non-wives in his bedroom. No worries for his broken marriage, as this is merely a heroic phase he has to see through to the end like any midlife crisis.
Noise would have been far better suited as a short. The film takes an idea to which everyone can relate and drags it out until it becomes another movie. What begins as an ode to cacophony tumbles into an everyman's hero fantasy that spins out of control. Even the style abruptly changes as Owen's narration -- which occurs to the extent of needlessly addressing the audience -- discontinues when it catches up to the present, and the point of view shifts at whim.
Working on a very thin idea that takes "write what you know about" to an extreme, this film falls flat very quickly. In an effort to save the theme, the film diverges into rambling territory that feels like a first draft. Ultimately, Noise presents a joke but forgets the punch line, and everyone is left with a headache.