I used to live in an apartment complex many moons ago. And there
were these two residents--a man and a woman--who had car alarms. They lived
separately from each other, and their cars couldn’t be more different from each
other’s. But what they shared was the highly annoying habit of their car alarms
going off for hours at a time, day and night. One of them had a high end car
alarm which actually spoke ("Step away from the car!") in a threatening tone,
while the other had the type of alarm which was described to me as being a
screeching, nails on a blackboard kind of alarm that felt like a knife being
shoved through your ears. I couldn’t hear these shrieking cars--this was one of
those occasions where being deaf was a huge benefit--but I felt very sorry for my
neighbors who did.
In Noise, Tim Robbins stars as David Owen, a corporate attorney who’s living the good life in New York City. He’s got it all; a loving wife who works as a professional chamber musician, an adorable daughter and a spacious duplex in a great neighborhood. It almost feels like one of Woody Allen’s warm and fuzzy comedies, which depicts life in the Big Apple as being a wondrous, affluent fantasy. But Noise departs from this fantasy by showing the dark underside of New York City that Allen rarely shows in any of his films. David Owen finds himself distracted by the urban noise--namely, the jangling car alarms that go off for no reason at all hours of the day and night. He tries to report them, but the police don’t care. And when he even tries to sue the owners of the noisy cars, his cases are always dismissed.
After several incidents where an enraged David is arrested after attacking a car with a blaring alarm, he goes the vigilante route. Getting dressed in black and armed with various break-in tools, David becomes the Rectifier. He breaks into cars and disables their alarms, leaving a note to the car’s owner detailing why he did what he did. David’s wife, well-played by Bridget Moynahan, pleads with him to just let it slide--to just close the window on the blaring car alarms. But David’s attitude is, "what if I want to keep the window open?" With his independently produced film, writer/director Henry Bean is more interested in having Noise become something more than just a tirade against errant car alarms. It deals overall with the impotence that most urban dwellers feel as they are buffeted on all sides by the insensitivity of city life.
It should come as no surprise that William Hurt plays his mayor character like
an obnoxious boor who sees his constituents--the very people whom he’s supposed
to be serving--more as a hated enemy to be conquered. Cast adrift in this
uncaring environment, David soon does whatever he has to in order to bring light
to the fact that loud, abrasive noise--no matter what the source--is just as
much an assault on a person as attacking them with a baseball bat. Noise is a
sharply written comedy that offers much food for thought, especially for people
who’ve had to deal with noisy neighbors, or just the regular, everyday,
ear-splitting environment of their daily life. Noise is a must-see, not just
because it’s a well-made comedy, but because of the very valid idea that it proposes:
why do we put up with all this noise?
--SF
