MBunge If you took an extended rant by Andy Rooney on the evils of car alarms, mixed it with a late night, dorm room bull session by a bunch of college kids who just had their first philosophy class and blended that with a man's mid-life crisis…you'd end up with something like this film. Except Noise is even worse than you'd imagine that combination could be.This sputtering, ostentatious, anti-social and smug goulash of a movie essentially presents the equivalent of the Unabomber as not just a hero, but a moral exemplar. Chris Owen (Tim Robbins) hates noise. That makes living in New York City, one of the noisiest metropolises on Earth, a bit problematic. But that's where David lives with his wife Helen (Bridget Moynahan) and his daughter Chris (Gabrielle Brennan). David doesn't just hate noise. He rages against it as an assault on his personal dignity. He's so consumed with fury that he starts attacking cars whose alarms have gone off without reason and continue blaring without stop. Even after he gets thrown in jail for his vandalism, David still won't stop. He loses his job, but he won't stop. His wife takes his daughter and leaves him. He still won't stop. David becomes an urban vigilante known as "The Rectifier", disabling car alarms all over New York. That draws the absurdly irrational hatred of the city's mayor (William Hurt) and the attention of a young European woman named Ekaterina Filippovna (Margarita Levieva). She's captivated by David's purpose and certainty and tries to direct him away from petty theft to political progress. The mayor tries to stop them and that suddenly morphs the film into a courtroom drama.Just in case I haven't made it perfectly clear yet…Noise is horrible. It is a wildly inconsistent and alienating movie that splices political agitprop, philosophical wankery, juvenile power fantasies and middle aged desperation into one long stream of consciousness that batters against you like waves upon the rocks. This is the sort of movie that thinks a having a few lines of dialog reference Hegel makes it intellectual. It thinks it has to specifically point out the obvious contradiction in its main character because the audience is too stupid to see it themselves. It fantasizes that angry social misfits are exactly the sort of man with whom women want to have a threesome. And it glories in an unreflective, Holden Caulfieldesque sense of superiority over the rest of the world.Tim Robbins shuffles through Noise like a severe manic-depressive whose medication occasionally wears off. William Hurt gives a bizarre performance as a 19th century anarchist's idea of what a politician is like. Bridget Moynahan might as well be a potted plant. Margarita Levieva plays a character so convenient and ephemeral that it would have made more sense for Ekaterina to be a schizophrenic hallucination that only David could see.Noise makes it seem like writer/director Henry Bean suffers from multiple personalities and each took a turn in crafting a different part of this film. Unfortunately, all of his personalities are terminally boring and none of them know what the others are doing. Fantasy and realism, drama and melodrama, comedy and tedium rattle against each other. There's even a point where the movie acknowledges that it's fiction, presenting itself like edgy propaganda meant to provoke a response from the audience. The only response you'll want to make is to throw something at the screen.I can't understand how anyone who read this script gave Bean the money to make this film. I can't imagine how anyone who watches Noise would ever give him any money to ever make another movie. I can only hope he can find himself some other employment so we're not subjected to any more of his work.

robert-temple-1 Yes please, I want Tim Robbins with me everywhere I go. He will stop all those car alarms, building alarms, all the worst traffic noise, and keep me safe from being driven crazy by the noise of modern life. If only! This extraordinarily original film written and directed by Henry Bean utters the same sentiments of the vox populi as were expressed by Peter Finch in Paddy Chayefsky's script for NETWORK (1976): 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!' (You may remember if you ever saw that film that Finch used the medium of television to persuade tens of thousands of people all over America to throw open their windows and scream that protest into the streets.) The noise of modern urban life is clearly intolerable, and this wonderful comedic treatment of the subject is full of laughs tempered by the solemn realization that it is all, alas, too true. We have all been beaten down into passive acceptance of the intolerable, and that is the theme of this film: Tim Robbins is mad as hell and he isn't going to take it anymore. So he becomes 'The Rectifier', a kind of anonymous heroic Batman figure who goes round Manhattan disabling car alarms which have gone off on the streets, by smashing the car windows and cutting the alarm cables. This leads to a confrontation with the Mayor of New York, gauchely portrayed by William Hurt as a hectoring bully in a wig of the wrong colour and with an effete manner (amusing: where did that characterisation come from?) Tim Robbins is perfect, absolutely perfect, in the part of the rebel against the noise pollution. He is a master of that dreamy face of the idealist lost in his own quest for some unattainable perfection (in this case, silence). His wife, played by Bridget Moynahan, does not understand or tolerate him. Although she is a professional cellist and should know better, she is above all things a petite bourgeois and reacts as one: she commences an affair and throws him out of the house after saying of his crusade against car alarms: 'How can you do this to me?', with the emphasis on the me. Am I the only one who has noticed it, or are there others out there who have also noticed, that 95% of American movies over the past twenty years have contained angry young women? They are usually angry and vindictive ex-wives, but sometimes, as in this film, they are angry and vindictive wives. What they all have in common is an unquestioning narcissistic arrogance, total lack of rapport with any partner, and a contempt for all men, especially those whom they use as dispensable husband-toys. Is this really going on in life itself, or is it only in the movies? Surely this is a symptom of malaise in contemporary American society of a most troubling kind. It is more troubling to me than the urban noise, frankly. As a marital reject, living on his own in an even noisier neighbourhood (24th Street and Sixth Avenue, help!), Robbins is emotionally rescued by an extremely weird girl who hero-worships him (or at least does so temporarily), played scarily by the Russian/Jewish/American actress Margarita Levieva, who is sometimes a bit difficult to understand because of her accent. She is into sex in a major way and there is a threesome scene which is rather hilarious where she brings back to Robbins's apartment an even wilder creature, a Spanish gal played with droll panache by Maria Ballesteros, whose accent is even more impenetrable. The two gals have an interesting discussion about the relative merits of their private organs, which they take turns examining, while Robbins sits smoking a joint and speculating about the urban nose outside. Levieva is always pontificating about philosophy and quoting Hegel and being an aspiring hyper-intellectual. All of this is wonderfully funny satire, possibly based upon Henry Bean's private experiences, or should I suggest possibly his private parts experiences. There are numerous comedic characters and brilliant minor touches throughout the film where Bean succeeds in giving depth to minor players, with considerable success. Many 'members of the crowd', and even two irrepressible members of a jury, turn miraculously into hilarious characters, as the entire story is littered with the pathos of the multiple stories of the lives of countless supporting players. This is an amazing feat of screen writing and direction, and I wonder whether anyone has really appreciated the extent of Henry Bean's incredible talent and achievement. This film really is a classic, it truly is. Woody Allen ought to take a refresher course in comedy by studying the meticulous construction and realization of this film, which has a freshness and creativity about it which is lacking in, for instance, Allen's MELINDA AND MELINDA. What a pity that Henry Bean has made so few films. Perhaps he is too original, but thank God that he is.

gkeith-russell Hey, this is a great film to watch on a long haul flight. The existential drama is more play than film, more essay than story, but it has its attractions. The project maybe anarchic but in the end normality is restored, the individual is better adjusted and the danger of action has been accommodated within the everyday world. It could be a mature taste is needed, it could be that the subtle attractions of an anti-hero who is struggling with Hegel, but, somewhere in this cultural density, there are views of sexuality that shift attention from the repressed to the expressed. The same goes for middle age rage. And anyway, Robbins is at his best as a Camus styled man of his time.

tedg I suppose there are lots of people who believe that their lives are full, interesting, deep and would make a good movie.I also suppose that anyone who thinks so is wrong. Here's one. Some dullard got arrested for breaking into a car to disable its alarm. He then thought he could make a meaningful movie about it and somehow got it financed, with himself as writer/director.The backbone of the story is this guys obsession, which boils down pretty much to anger management. Tacked on are two other story lines, one about a smarmy major. They must have had more planned and possibly shot here because he is played by William Hurt. The other side story is about a woman he spends time with after his wife kicks him out of the house.In a competent writer's hands, these three threads could have been done well. As it happens we have some charming women in weak roles. María Ballesteros has a riveting 30 seconds with a talk about bodily imperfection. Its an almost Mamet segment about inner angels. But the rest of this is a huge waste, just noise.Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.