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04:12pm ET, 12/02/08

KYW Newsradio Movie Review

Noise

by KYW's Bill Wine

It's an aural Death Wish, a parked and unattended Taxi Driver, a for-your-ears-only Rambo, or a deafening Falling Down.

It's Noise, a black social satire about a New York City resident obsessed with the cacophony of urban sounds. Is he an out-of-control fanatic, a typical New Yorker, or a righteous, idealistic activist? Is noise reduction his calling or his narcotic? You make the call.

Tim Robbins stars as David Owen, a lawyer being driven crazy by sound pollution, especially the city's ubiquitous, incessant car alarms, those seemingly pointless accessories that city law requires shut themselves off after three minutes. But that means that they remain on for what at 3:00am feels like the longest and most irritating three minutes anyone has ever experienced.

So monomaniacal David becomes a one-man vigilante committee in an attempt to curtail the exasperating noise and raise the quality of life by returning to some acceptable form of peace and quiet. Yep, he is (like a certain other, earlier movie New Yorker) mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore.

Frustrated and disoriented (Sleep, sex? Where, when?), he starts by letting the air out of the tires on offending vehicles.

Then he raises the stakes to vehicular terrorism, using a hammer, a golf club, or any other handy weapon he can get his hands on. He's an Iron Man of a different stripe, although he calls himself The Rectifier. And he intends to vandalize, disable, and liberate all the alarms that go off from their host vehicles.

Later, he takes a series of offenders to Small Claims Court. But nothing gains him the satisfaction he craves.

Unsurprisingly, he loses his job, embarrasses his daughter, and alienates his musician wife (played by Bridget Moynahan), who at first thinks he's having a nervous breakdown and eventually boots him out of the house.

Then he gets in trouble with the law, and later comes up against the Big Apple's cartoonishly Giulianiesque mayor, played by William Hurt, who calls him a menace even though the public sees him as a hero.

Writer-director Henry Bean -- a screenwriter whose directorial debut, the edgy 2001 drama The Believer, introduced Ryan Gosling to moviegoers -- follows it up with a broad, sometimes wandering black comedy that boasts a wittily sarcastic script, even if some of the insights provided by the characters come more from the screenwriter's mind and mouth than from theirs.

But we do appreciate that city noise in his screenplay merely stands in for any of the indignities of contemporary society that we've learned to live with and not even "hear." (What time is the cell phone etiquette seminar again?)

Bean doesn't quite follow through on his satirical, promisingly provocative premise, venturing off in a couple directions that veer away from, rather than intensify, the central conflict. And too often his film is, like a car alarm, overly insistent as it sounds its single note.

Furthermore, it doesn't so much end as throws up its hands, announces that it's had enough, and packs it in.

Yet the script is thoughtful and Robbins is engaging, which is no small feat when you consider that, given his behavior, this guy is an absolute menace to society. But on balance, we're grateful for this small-but-not-quiet movie's existence if not its completeness or triumph.

So we, all ears, will trade in our earplugs for 2½ stars out of 4 for an alarming and disarming comedy about urban anxiety.

Honk if you find yourself rooting for him. No, wait, don't. Just tell me instead. Anyway, Noise is a movie worth seeing. And hearing.

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