★★★ (3 out of 4)
Sometimes good things really do come in small indie packages. Take “Tuner,” now in theaters where rising Brit newcomer Leo Woodall (“The White Lotus,” “Nuremberg,” “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy”) pairs up with all-timer Dustin Hoffman (Legends don’t need credits.) as piano tuners turned small time crooks. Generations separate Woodall, 29, and Hoffman, 88, but their teamwork is an unalloyed, unexpected pleasure.
Hoffman excels as Harry Horowitz, a revered Manhattan-based piano technician with one drawback—he’s losing his hearing. Enter Woodall as Niki White, Harry’s apprentice whose problem is the opposite. Niki hears too much. Without earplugs, the volume of everything is pumped up beyond endurance. The city’s car horns hit Niki’s ears like bullets. His condition is called hyperacusis. Even the slightest noise makes his head throb. In short, Niki and Harry are the perfect match, except when tone-deaf clients ask them to fix other things like toilets and dodgy WiFi.
Leo Woodall and Dustin Hoffman are in tune and totally irresistible. Is that enough? Hell yeah.
The film’s director Daniel Roher, an Oscar-winning documentarian for “Navalny,” makes his narrative feature debut with “Tuner.” And his keen sense of nuance in sight and sound works wonders. Hoffman and Woodall keep us locked on these two men, even when the script by Roher and Robert Ramsay adds contrivances it didn’t need.
The romcom layer of the script seems extraneous, despite the beguiling spirit that Havana Rose Liu brings to the role of Ruthie, a music composition student Niki falls for. He’s envious, of course, that Ruthie has no restrictions on the sounds she lets into her life. And like Harry, she knows that Niki isn’t just another piano man; he’s a virtuoso.
The scene in which Ruthie tests Niki’s pitch and his gift for identifying notes by ear might be the sexiest meet-cute in recent movie memory. Trouble intrudes when Ruthie swerves away to direct her attention on nabbing a fellowship with a musical genius, played ego first by the sublime Jean Reno.
Niki leans hard on Harry and his tart-tongued wife Marla (Tovah Feldshuh), acting like surrogate parents to this prodigy, and he finds a new direction when Harry forgets the combination of his portable safe in which his life-saving meds reside. Each click sends a message to Harry, and a career in safecracking is suddenly born.
Niki’s need for money is intensified when Harry suffers a heart attack causing his hospital bills to mount. Where is Harry going to get the minimum $36,000 payment that he needs? That’s when a trio of Israeli thieves, led by Uri (Lior Raz), enlists Niki in a grand scheme that strains credulity past the breaking point.
Few movies could recover from this absurdist quicksand and the absence of scene-stealer Hoffman in the final stretch. Still, Woodall does his damndest, with a blast of star potential so strong we’d follow him anywhere. That includes a sappy happy ending that I didn’t believe for a minute. No matter. Woodall and Hoffman are in tune and totally irresistible. Is that enough? Hell yeah.