Daniel Roher, “Tuner” (2015)
The notion that a piano tuner and a safe-cracking expert can share similar attributes – an incredibly sharp sense of hearing, tactile sensitivity, and a heckuva lot of patience – underlies the plot of Daniel Roher’s likeable if rather undercooked debut as a director of feature films. Niki (Leo Woodall), the eponymous would-be hero, is in business as a young piano tuner with an old friend of his father, Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman), zooming around New York City in their van to answer the calls of wealthy clients to have their pianos tuned for various social events. Niki was once a child prodigy destined for a career as a concert pianist but a hearing condition that makes him hyper-sensitive to sound and environmental noise has forced him to give up this future and he has had to settle for a technical job that, while it keeps him busy and gives him opportunities to see how the rich and fatuous live, apparently pays peanuts – in Hollywood, anyway. (In real life, a professional piano tuner would be making a fairly tidy income, enough to live comfortably.)
On a typical day at work, Niki tunes a piano at a conservatory and there meets Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), a student pianist hell-bent on becoming assistant to renowned composer Marius Meissner (Jean Reno). After tuning the piano, Niki races to another job which has to be scheduled for the evening, due to work construction at the client’s mansion; during the evening while he is working, Niki stumbles across an Israeli gang attempting to open a safe. Having taught himself to open Harry’s safe from watching Youtube videos, after Harry has forgotten the combination, Niki opens the safe for the thieves quickly and easily. The gang leader Uri (Lior Raz) offers Niki loads of dosh if he will join the gang; Niki initially declines, but after Harry suffers a stroke and his hospital bills go into triple zeroes, Niki accepts Uri’s offer to save Harry and his wife Marla (Tovah Feldschuh) from bankruptcy. From then on, Uri, his accomplices Benny (a nephew) and Yoni, and Niki travel around NYC posing as a security company to rob wealthy New Yorkers – including wealthy Jewish New Yorkers – of their valuables. In the meantime, Niki helps to fix Ruthie’s own piano, inherited from her grandmother, and as a romance develops between them, Niki offers Ruthie a watch from a stash of jewellery taken from a safe with Uri and his gang.
So far, everything seems to go swimmingly for Niki in his double act as piano tuner / safe cracker, until Uri gets a job from two Korean gangsters to crack open their uncle’s safe so they can get the old guy’s cryptocurrency wallet holding the passwords to cracking his crypto account. You know what’s coming next – the job goes wrong, someone gets killed and Niki falls out with the gang over access to the passwords to get the uncle’s money. To top it all off, Harry dies and his death together with Ruthie’s increasing anxiety and obsession with her upcoming music performance cause Niki to lash out at Ruthie and run off – only to run into Uri who forces him to open the uncle’s safe.
At this point, the plot becomes threadbare and loses credibility, as Ruthie discovers the watch Niki has given her was actually stolen from Meissner’s home. Niki confesses the crime to Meissner and offers to recover a second watch stolen from Meissner in exchange for Meissner not reporting him to the police. This of course means Niki has to steal the watch directly from Uri himself. A showdown between the two is not long in coming …
The various shenanigans that involve Niki getting deeper into crime can be amusing in the way Roher tells the piano tuner’s story, thanks to sharp and speedy editing. Thanks to deft performances from Woodall and Hoffman in fleshing out their respective characters, viewers do come to identify somewhat with Niki, put upon by clients who treat their pianos as ornaments and mistake piano tuners for plumbers, and led astray by Uri at a vulnerable moment in his life when Harry’s past health insurance decisions clash with the imperatives of a neo-capitalist US healthcare system once the old codger needs medical care. The rest of the cast does adequate work in playing characters that are little more than stereotypes.
Though the film provides a romantic sub-plot to intersect with the main plot to test Niki’s moral mettle, the romance does not follow the traditional Hollywood path of boy-meets-girl / boy-loses-girl / boy-reunites-with-girl, and though Niki will meet Ruthie again after the dust finally settles – and even the way the dust settles isn’t totally clear (does Benny finally prove himself the man his uncle intends him to be?) – their relationship seems to have stalled and the film ends with a loose end. The central plot, as it becomes increasingly contrived, shrinks back from what we’d expect, and the result, like the romance, ends up having to be filled in by the audience – though the film does drop hints along the way that Benny isn’t the sideshow clown he appears to be.
Revolving as it does around Woodall’s performance, even to the extent of taking his point of view with respect to the sounds he hears (or does not hear, after Uri has blown the airhorn at him), and the banter between him and Hoffman’s Harry, the film pays cursory attention to aspects of social class and the competition and attitudes it engenders in the various surface-level characters we meet. The wily Uri manipulates Niki with stories about rich people having robbed poor folks with Ponzi schemes of badly underwritten subprime mortgage loans; and Ruthie in her obsessional quest shows very little compassion for Niki over Harry’s death even though it was Harry who encouraged Niki to date Ruthie originally. A subtle sub-text about Jews exploiting other Jews – Uri and his gang get away with what they do by convincing wealthy Jews to trust them because they are Israeli – is present.
In general though, audiences will come away with an impression of a slight crime caper thriller, improbable in plot and perhaps not entirely satisfying in its resolution – but the film does make a point about perfection-versus-imperfection, and that perfection is only achieved when the entire context (and not an individual object or occurrence) is considered.