Noise (2008) Review

At no point during the comedy-drama Noise does star Tim Robbins, as a put upon Manhattan husband driven over the edge by the wee hour sounds of malfunctioning car alarms, stand in front of a bathroom mirror to repeat the battle cry, 'You honkin' at me?... Are YOU honkin' at me?'

Making the Wrong Kind of Noise

Which is too bad, because if this film had fully embraced the over the top spirit that only really emerges whenever William Hurt's preening Mayor Schneer is in the picture, it could have hit its stride as an operatic black comedy.

The fed-up white guy vigilante elements of the plot have led people to summarily lump this one in with respective 1970's and 1990's classics Taxi Driver and Falling Down. But really, the end result falls more in line with the 1935 Betty Boop cartoon Stop That Noise and the clunky 1964 John McGiver starring Twilight Zone episode "Sounds and Silences." Writer-director Henry Bean's second directorial effort would have fared much better if Robbins' character of David Owen had been allowed to channel his frustrations into a successful grassroots mayoral campaign rather than a life-or-death takedown of front hood fracases.

Over the years, we've watched Robbins espouse all manner of political causes, from Ralph Nader to globalization to the war in Iraq. And though the issue of New York City noise pollution must have struck enough of a chord with the resident actor to make him willing to do this film for a song, it's still disorienting to see him devoting such fervent effort to an issue that will come across to many non-big city moviegoers as laughable.

Sure enough, it turns out that it isn't Robbins who has a bug up his steering wheel about car alarms but Bean. At last fall's Rome International Film Festival, the filmmaker talked openly about how he, in real life, did many of the things Owen does in the film including winding up at one point in the slammer. Too bad then that Bean didn't pursue the other Option B, that of a documentary revisit of the noise topic framed by his own personal activism.

Turns out the real culprit with regards to these 2 a.m. Big Apple outbursts are the car alarm industry lobbyists who targeted Section 167-d(12) of the New York State Insurance Law. Back in the early 1980's, the regulation was amended so as to require insurance companies to give discounted rates to any owner of a vehicle equipped with a car alarm. A documentary could have addressed all kinds of fascinating angles of the evolving Manhattan car alarm issue: the fact that insurance company actuaries did not support this law change; the idea that law enforcement authorities and criminologists feel there are far better ways to prevent auto theft; and even the notion that economists suggest the social costs of the resultant noise pollution far outweigh any financial benefits.

In the end, alarm activist Bean's best strategy would have been to give Robbins a microphone, expand the focus to all forms of New York noise pollution and follow the actor around with a camera crew to get to the bottom of another politically bungled situation. At the very least, Honk If You're Fed Up! would have had more compelling co-stars (citizens organization Silent Majority, anti-car alarm campaigner and former Democratic New York Councilwoman Eva Moskovitz...) and better plot points, like Mayor Michael Bloomberg's decision in December of 2005 not to include a full ban of ice cream truck jingles in his new city noise code.