The smashing new film Tuner—which you must go see if you like movies at all—has similarities to so many other things made in the past decade that it might seem derivative. A plot that involves purloining objects from ultra-wealthy people who will never even know they’ve been robbed evokes the Apple TV series Your Friends & Neighbors. A character with a profound hearing problem that makes him an ideal participant in a crime ring brings back memories of the terrific 2017 film Baby Driver. A hyper-intense student musician’s approaching concert is filmed in a manner more akin to a horror movie than a character study, which gives Tuner a haunting and jangly quality akin to Whiplash.
And yet Tuner is its own idiosyncratic thing, and quite a wonderful thing it is. It begins as a shaggy-dog story about a withdrawn young man and his grandfatherly boss who work as piano tuners in New York. They are viewed with such little regard for their very particular skill that the people who hire them also demand they fix the toilet and reset the router. The young man is played by the British actor Leo Woodall, who manages to hold the screen even though his character, Niki White, doesn’t talk or interact very much—for reasons that are finally explained in an extraordinarily moving monologue near the climax. His silence is more than made up for by the garrulous and tender Harry Horowitz, a jazz musician of real repute who uses piano tuning to keep a roof over his head. Harry is played by the 88-year-old Dustin Hoffman in the loveliest performance of his career and one that will likely be remembered during awards season.
The cowriter and director, Daniel Roher, makes this part of Tuner seem utterly lived in. The two men love and annoy each other, and they are deadly serious about their work. Niki has a condition called "hyperacusis" that makes any loud sound a torment to him; he says he has an allergy to noise. So a job that demands he be able to hear the tiniest changes in pitch is perfect for him. And that skill, it seems, also comes in handy if you have to open a combination safe. Niki teaches himself how to do it one night by watching YouTube videos.
And then, in a house visit to a New Jersey mansion where Billy Joel is to play the piano at a benefit the following night, he encounters a security team installing new equipment—and robbing the place at the same time. They’re led by the charming and garrulous Uri—he is played by Lior Raz, the co-creator and star of Fauda. Niki needs money; he’s developed this safecracking skill; and Uri explains to him that the people he steals from are so rich they don’t ever miss what is taken from them. Besides, he says, the guy whose safe he talks Niki into cracking was responsible for the subprime mortgage crisis. (In Hebrew, his crew expresses puzzlement, because the owner of the house actually makes a vacuum cleaner that’s sold on TV.)
When I realized the bad guys in this movie were Israeli, I got a pit in my stomach, fearing the worst. But the characterizations are so exact, and the situation so unique, that there isn’t any reason to believe we are to view them as a metaphor for Bibi, or Gaza, or anything. The Israelis make for interesting and amusing criminal stooges, and they are quite lovingly rendered. Besides, Lior Raz is so electrifying in the role of Uri that all you want is for him to have as much screentime as possible.
Everything in Tuner happens in the same week, which gives the movie real drive and momentum. Niki teaches himself safecracking; he meets Uri; Harry is hospitalized and has no insurance; and Niki falls for a type-A piano student named Ruthie (brilliantly played by Havana Rose Liu) who is preparing to play a piece of music she has written for the greatest living classical composer in hopes of being hired as his assistant. As in all movies about naïfs who back into a life of crime, things go wonderfully for a while and then start to go very, very wrong.
Tuner has classic Hollywood noir plot points. A well-meaning guy gets in over his head when he pursues illicit money for a noble purpose. And like all schnook heroes, Niki doesn’t realize how easy he will be for the bad guys to control, simply because they can take advantage of his hearing disability.
This is an intense movie that doesn’t feel intense, because it also has a shaggy sweetness to it. Roher finds a way to surprise you every 5 or 10 minutes, and in the final 15 minutes everything clicks into place like a combination lock. Roher is 33 years old and has already won an Oscar for his documentary about the anti-Putin activist Alexei Navalny. Tuner marks him as a major narrative talent, with a keen directorial eye, a great ear for dialogue (the movie was cowritten by Robert Ramsey), and a natural feel for pace and texture. This is the best movie of the year so far.
