Review: TUNER

 by Rob DiCristino

What if a piano tuner…was also a CRIMINAL!?

Roger Ebert taught us that there are few things in movies more satisfying than watching skilled professionals excel at their work. It’s a true joy, for example, to watch Danny Ocean and his crew robbing casinos. To watch Billy Beane trading for baseball players. To watch Paul Blart mall copping. It’s aspirational, isn’t it? Seeing Bruce Lee roundhouse kick a guy makes us feel like we, too, might one day be able to roundhouse kick a guy. That probably goes double for niche professions like piano tuning. Think about it: How many movies featuring piano tuners — only Béla Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies comes to my mind — have you ever seen? That’s because it’s a dying art practiced only by eccentric devotees like Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman) and his young apprentice, Niki White (Leo Woodall), in celebrated documentarian Daniel Roher’s (Navalny) narrative debut, Tuner. But while Roger would have lauded Tuner’s focus on such a specialized talent, he would have been even more frustrated by the rote and predictable thriller it ends up inspiring.

A former piano prodigy whose career was cut short by a debilitating case of hyperacusis — it’s like tinnitus, Niki explains; he’s essentially allergic to loud noises — Niki spends his days criss-crossing the Five Boroughs with Harry in their repair van, popping in and out of swanky mansions whose owners barely even notice that they own pianos (“They fall out of tune whether you play them or not,” Niki explains to a particularly uncooperative one-percenter) let alone appreciate his unrealized genius. That all changes when he meets Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), a type-A graduate composition student who practically quivers right out of her skivvies when Niki demonstrates his perfect pitch. What feels at first like a match made in heaven is complicated when Harry has a heart attack, forcing the OG out of commission and saddling him and his wife (Tovah Feldshuh as Marla) with $35,000 in debt. Luckily, Niki just happens to have discovered a new talent for safe-cracking, and local gangster Uri (Lior Raz) just happens to have an opening for his particular set of skills.

If that last part seems a bit perfunctory, well, it should. Structured like a rom-com that keeps being interrupted by a crime thriller, Tuner is at its best when it’s developing the bond between Harry and Niki — Niki’s late father was Harry’s partner back in the day, which Niki honors by looking out for the old man — and the unlikely romance between Niki and Ruthie: Despite catering to the upper crust, Niki’s work is decidedly working-class compared to Ruthie’s. She’s putting the finishing touches on a thesis piece that she hopes will earn her an apprenticeship with acclaimed maestro Meissner (Jean Reno, gloriously aged from human cigarette into august elder statesman). Roher’s screenplay (co-written with Robert Ramsey) tries to balance that by drawing attention to the hidden delicacy of Niki’s work — one key out of tune compromises the other eighty-seven, etc. — which in turn creates a missed opportunity to extend that metaphor to the characters themselves. Out of Tune? Out of Key? The point is that there’s a good dramedy in here, somewhere.

Instead, Tuner takes an abrupt second-act left turn and devolves into an undercooked “the-kid’s-in-over-his-head” crime thriller jammed with so many off-the-shelf tropes and clichés that you’ll actually find yourself missing the singular charm of Dustin Hoffman (!) once everyone starts screaming and shooting at each other. Roher is a talent stylist, to be sure, and his final product is about as slick as slick can be — occasional flourishes, like when Niki navigates a booming rave completely MOS, keep Tuner from feeling too Netflixy — but neither Uri nor any of his bumbling, manchildish goons (including Nissan Sakira and Gil Cohen) come anywhere close to earning the disproportionate attention the plot is required to give them. Even scattered thematic seeds about class warfare — like how Uri convinces Niki to help him rob the wealthy in part because they don’t appreciate what they have, which should have dovetailed nicely with Niki’s own regrets about his wasted potential — end up having next to no real effect on where Tuner goes in its climax.

In fairness, Tuner does close on an elegant note — literally — that hints at the depths the film might have been able to probe with more time and a different structure. Also, in a cinematic landscape full of cheapo streamers like Thrash and…wait. What was the name of the Charlize Theron thing I just watched? Oh, Apex! Anyway. In light of all that bullshit, it might be worth celebrating Roher’s technical skill and eye for specificity: The parts of Tuner that work do so because he takes the time to invest in a moment, an emotion, or a detail that nearly every other genre programmer would overlook. With that in mind, we might reframe Tuner’s two-and-a-half-star mediocrity as the efficient employment of tried-and-true technique — think of a world-renowned chef making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich — and focus on what lessons he might take into his next feature effort. I hope it’s not a sequel to Tuner, though, because you can’t call it 2ner. Two-ner, maybe? No, that’s confusing. Look, Roher’s a talented guy. I’m sure he’ll come up with something.

Tuner is in limited U.S. release today and opens wide on May 29th.