Leo Woodall Hits the Right Notes in Tuner
Leo Woodall leads an engaging crime drama about a gifted piano tuner whose talents draw him into a dangerous criminal underworld.
Leo Woodall first made a splash in the Italy-set second season of The White Lotus portraying a duplicitous gigolo hired by those gays trying to murder Jennifer Coolidge’s daffy heiress.
The English actor has since bedded Bridget Jones in the Emmy-nominated Peacock feature Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, led AppleTV’s thriller series Prime Target as a queer mathematician on the run from shadowy government agencies, and acted through 15 years of a boy-meets-girl love story in Netflix’s limited series One Day.
Poised for a bigger breakout, Woodall makes the most of his first big-screen starring role in Tuner, as a New York piano tuner drawn into a life of crime.
The film also marks a first for director Daniel Roher, the Oscar-winning documentarian behind Navalny and The AI Doc, making his narrative feature debut. Roher’s skills behind the camera definitely elevate the script, co-written with Robert Ramsey, which weaves an absorbing, if formulaic, heist-and-romance drama around Woodall’s Niki White.
Somewhat of a loner, Niki hears the world differently than everyone else. He has perfect pitch and acute hearing, but also a serious condition called hyperacusis, an extreme sensitivity to noise. He’s forced to wear earplugs plus noise-canceling headphones at almost all times, living constantly with the danger of unpredictable environments and sudden loud noises.
Employing every tool in editing and sound design to convey Niki’s unique relationship to the world, Tuner delivers a deep exploration of sound, pitch, and harmony, while sticking to the story and powerfully evoking his experience. The film so effectively engenders empathy for Niki that when a smoke alarm starts blaring over his head, you’re likely to cringe in pain along with him.
Certainly, Woodall captures the agony of Niki’s condition, as well as the virtuosity of his skills. His super hearing is an amazing gift, and a physical disability that the film treats with due care.
In fact, the movie’s compassionate streak is one of its finer qualities — along with the cast, including Havana Rose Liu, as love interest Ruthie, an advanced music composition student who gets her piano tuned by Niki, and Dustin Hoffman as his wily boss and mentor Harry.
Not stretching too hard to portray the playful, self-described “old fart,” Hoffman injects an upbeat, comic energy opposite Woodall’s laidback straight man. Harry’s the OG, known throughout the Tri-State for tuning the grands of the greats, like Herbie Hancock (who makes a quick cameo) and Billy Joel (who’s only referenced, but it gets a laugh).
Harry and Niki’s buddy-comedy rapport, and the compelling courtship of Ruthie, nicely counterbalance the sinister atmosphere of the movie’s violent criminal underworld. Niki finds himself trapped on the dark side after he starts putting his talents to use cracking safes for shady security expert Uri (Lior Raz) and his ring of thieves.
For a good stretch, the film cuts deftly back and forth between storylines, its disparate moods and rhythms goosed by Will Bates’ jazz-inflected score and Ruthie’s lushly emotional classical compositions (actually composed by Marius De Vries). But, as Niki’s involvement with Uri’s gang spirals into full-on Miami Vice territory, the tuner’s double life starts to feel like he’s existing in two totally different films.
In the film’s final act, Roher strains to fuse heist thriller, romance, and character portrait into a cohesive whole, with the plot turning on a tragic coincidence that beggars belief. The result registers as slightly out of tune.
However, as Niki says, tuning a piano is “about creating harmony out of chaos,” and that would also apply to filmmaking. With some calibration, Tuner finds perfect harmony in its moving conclusion, a well-earned burst of sound and passion that hits just the right note.
Tuner (★★★☆) is rated R and playing in theaters nationwide. Visit fandango.com.
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