By Armond White

Noise
Directed by Henry Bean


Sporting a Donald Trump drumlin of fake orange hair, a broad, Ed Koch forehead and favoring purple sartorial style, William Hurt’s performance in the social satire Noise parodies big-city politics in an impressively sly comic manner. Hurt’s Mayor Schneer is the target of yuppie David Owen (Tim Robbins), a Manhattanite who goes on a one-man campaign against traffic noises and car-alarms in a pathetic assertion of individual apartment-dweller’s rights. (“Close the window,” his wife says. “What if I want it open?” he philosophizes.) But Mayor Schneer has bigger interests: his own. Oafishly hogging space and time when holding forth before the media or his corps of yes-men, Schneer displays a fresh, self-amused style of vulgarity. When Owen’s activist-mistress declines his City Hall job offer, Mayor Schneer dismisses her royally: “So fuck yourself.” But Hurt isn’t only smug, he’s seething.

There is richer, deeper wit to William Hurt’s performance than anything else in Noise. The rare movie to twice invoke Hegel (Owen cracks the textbook Introduction to the Reading of Hegel), it flaunts “smartness” but succumbs to its own conceit. What writer-director Henry Bean thinks is funny about Owen’s temper (his Falling Down–style vigilantism—slashing tires, keying car doors, breaking windshields of loud, offending vehicles) just seems like brownstone-owner’s arrogance. Every urban-dweller knows city life means putting up with noise. But Noise turns pique into an exercise of yuppie self-justification. (It’s sophomoric, coming in just after David Mamet’s world-weary Redbelt.)

It’s hard to precisely tell how Owen’s self-destructive impulses lead him to political activism (he goes to jail to make a legal precedent of aural nuisance, yet Bean avoids showing the soul-destroying ennui of jail time). Owen proclaims, “This is not a psychological problem, it’s a social problem, it’s political,” yet he’s not political. Does Bean mean to rouse us out of political apathy? If he’s imitating Mamet’s arrogance and the reproachfulness of Paddy Chayefsky’s Hospital, his subjectivity makes Owen’s mission a misfired social commentary. (That was also the problem of Bean’s 2001 Jewish skinhead movie, The Believer.) Owen embarrasses his prep-school daughter, drives away his trophy wife (Bridget Moynahan) and takes a social-climbing lover (Ekaterina Filippovna) in a subplot that garbles Owen’s search for political/ethnic roots. Bean gives them an adulterer’s dialectic on ugly/beautiful pussy that is nowhere near as insightful or audacious as the one in Gigli. There hasn’t been such manifest smugness on screen since The Squid and the Whale. Hurt’s mayor makes a delightfully recognizable villain, but Owen’s loopily masochistic and self-righteous hero is somebody you don’t want to be around. Noise is only about validating middle-class privilege.
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