Market it right, and you can get people to pay for literally anything these days. Especially in Manhattan.
That’s why it’s not especially shocking when, at the start of the “The Sound of Silence,” the lead characters of Peter and Ellen meet because she’s hired him to tune her apartment.
Yes, we said tune her apartment, and no, she doesn’t live inside a piano. Peter (an excellent, excruciatingly sensitive Peter Sarsgaard) is a “home tuner,” able to detect the imperceptible frequencies coming from, say, your refrigerator or toaster – which in turn are affecting your mood and behavior. Ellen (a terrific Rashida Jones) is stressed and can’t sleep, and friends have suggested that Peter, whose work has been written up in The New Yorker no less, can help.
So far, so good. We’ve all paid for things that sound much less sensible, and hey, The New Yorker!
The somewhat frustrating thing about “The Sound of Silence,” a debut effort by director Michael Tyburski, who co-wrote the script with Ben Nabors, is not that we’re asked to buy into this boldly quirky premise, but that we sometimes can’t tell if the filmmakers themselves buy into it. There are moments in which the movie seems to veer decidedly toward self-knowing comedy but never quite gets there, and then turns so sad as to be tragic. The ambivalence becomes distracting, like so much white noise.