Henry Bean's Noise: The Art of?

Writer/Director Henry Bean's Noise isn't a perfect film, but that won't stop you from enjoying it.  Had Bean been able to even out the tone and style he would have easily one-upped his first effort, Ryan Gosling's coming out party, The Believer. But, as it is, Noise cheats itself out of being thought provoking and intelligent by indulging in random flights of fancy: self indulgent editing techniques (multiplying split screens), awkward shifts into broad humor and a handful of other scenes too pat for their own good.

But what's behind Noise is an issue that affects everyone, yet is seldom addressed: noise pollution. Bean digs beneath the surface of noise being more than a mere annoyance and fleshes out the issue on many ideological levels. At the heart of his exploration is German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel's concept of freedom: the notion of the soul as having a higher or fuller kind of reality than inanimate objects possess. In layman's terms: people matter more than cars with blaring alarms. The themes throughout Noise are filtered through David Owen (Tim Robbins), a successful husband and father who has become obsessed with silencing New York City's car alarms, burglar alarms and any other form of oppressive noise pollution. David's reasoning is sane (even if his actions are not) and if you live in a city, you can't help but sympathize with his plight, relate to it and even indulge in wish fulfillment as he bashes the windows of offending cars.David's increasing criminal/vigilante actions are the manifestation of what he defines as "impotence." By this he refers to the overall impotence he feels at not being able to do anything about all the things wrong with the world. His wife encourages him to just accept the world as is, but he refuses to, and his resultant actions not only lead him to jail, but to the collapse of his marriage and loss of his job. Instead of things spiraling into a dark abyss, fate steps in and leads David down a different path. He meets Ekaterina (Margarita Levieva) who inspires him to package his rage into a proactive and civilized manner, that ultimately allows him to deal with his issues and get his life back in order.

The bottom line is, we live in a world where personal freedoms have outgrown any sense of responsibility, accountability, or mere consideration those around us. The result is a world where dogs bark and shit freely, car alarms chirp unattended, children are free to cry, scream and throw tantrums, and no one really cares who suffers as a result. Sadly, there is little or no recourse to this problem and it is hard not to feel like David - impotent and frustrated by this affront to the quality of our lives. Noise pollution is a very real issue, a problem that affects the quality of millions of people's lives and it comes as a relief someone has finally made a film about it since us silent sufferers now have a voice, albeit an imperfect one.