DAN WEBSTER:
In his short-story collection The History of Sound, the writer Ben Shattuck shows a talent for using mere words to capture the essence of a mood.
In his title story, Shattuck’s protagonist talks of how, while on a summer trek with his friend and lover, he had never been happier. And this despite the weight of the equipment he carried, his blistered feet and the “black flies (that) left bloody welts” all over his neck,
Yet he experiences that joyful emotion, he says, “in the plain, dull way that resists any further articulation.” Instead, he adds, “It comes in images: sun hatching out of clouds while we walked through the hay fields flattened by days of rain, droplets lighting up around us, and birds shouting…”
Keying on Shattuck’s reference to imagery rather than literary exposition is key to understanding the choices that director Oliver Hermanus—working from a screenplay that Shattuck himself wrote—has made in adapting Shattuck’s stories. In switching from literature to cinema, Hermanus relies largely on visuals to underscore what Shattuck’s characters think and feel.
Also titled The History of Sound, Hermanus’ film keys on a Kentucky farm boy named Lionel Worthing (played as a young man by Paul Mescal). As told in flashback by a much older Lionel (narrated and later played by the Oscar-winning actor Chris Cooper), we learn how our protagonist met the man who would have a profound and lasting impact on his life.
The year is 1917, and both Lionel and David White (played by Josh O’Connor) are music students at Boston’s New England Conservatory. Voice student Lionel, reflecting the story’s title, has perfect pitch. Furthermore, he can see sound—“the shape and color, a wobbly circle, blackberry purple for D”—a talent that, as a boy, he thought everyone possessed.
Seated in a crowded café, Lionel notices David seated at a piano playing a familiar song. Soon the two are engaged in a conversation that continues until late, ending with their sleeping together. And they grow ever closer… until David is drafted into the Army and heads off to fight in World War I.
Lionel, not draft-worthy because he wears glasses, returns home to the family farm. A couple of years pass before he hears from David again, during which time Lionel’s father has died, leaving him to care both for the farm and his mother (played by Molly Price). But then he receives an invitation from David, now returned from the war and a teacher at Maine’s Bowdin College.
And so, to the consternation of his mother, Lionel quits the farm and heads north to accompany David on a hiking venture through New England. The mission: to collect folk songs from the people they encounter, with Lionel recording the songs on wax cylinders and David transcribing the lyrics.
Yet over the summer—with director Hermanus providing meditative visuals to Cooper’s ongoing narration—it becomes clear that something is bothering David. So at season’s end, when David declines Lionel’s offer to work further on the project, Lionel is left at loose ends. And though over the next few years he writes to David, he receives nothing in reply.
During those years Lionel’s life changes dramatically. A burgeoning musical career takes him to Italy (and an affair with Vincent, played by Alessandro Bidetti) and on to England (where he is engaged, for a while, to Clarissa, played by Emma Canning). No one, it seems, can hold on to Lionel for long.
Eventually, he returns to Maine to seek out David and, in the process, learns a painful truth that both surprises and saddens him—the full import of which he doesn’t discover until decades later when he received a mysterious package.
Mescal and O’Connor, both of whom are starring in a number of current films, are fine actors. As good as they are, though, the veteran Cooper is arguably better, able as he is at portraying a character’s feeling with both power and subtlety. And though Hermanus might have served his film better by providing maybe a tad more context, what he puts onscreen serves Shattuck’s screenplay well enough.
Less is more, as they say, a truism that applies well to The History of Sound.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for Spokesman.com.