THE STORY – Two young men during World War I set out to record the lives, voices, and music of their American countrymen.
THE CAST – Paul Mescal, Josh O’Connor, Molly Price, Raphael Sbarge, Hadley Robinson, Emma Canning & Chris Cooper
THE TEAM – Oliver Hermanus (Director) & Ben Shattuck (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 127 Minutes
For Lionel Worthing (Paul Mescal), music has always been more than just sound. He was born being able to see and feel it as well. Being so gifted in the early 1900s earned him a ticket off his Kentucky farm to attend the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston on scholarship. He wasn’t expecting to hear the folk songs of his youth while there, but one night, he hears a man singing a familiar tune and introduces himself. That man is David White (Josh O’Connor), who has a fascination for collecting songs nurtured by his British uncle on trips around the countryside when David was young. After exchanging a song for a song, David and Lionel become fast friends and then become something more. Separated by the war, the two men lose touch, but David eventually reaches back out, asking Lionel to join him on a song-collecting trip in rural Maine. But given all that’s working against them – social mores, David’s WWI experience, Lionel’s impoverished upbringing – for how long will they be able to keep making beautiful music together?
Oliver Hermanus’s “The History of Sound,” adapted by Ben Shattuck from his own short story, is precisely the kind of handsomely mounted period gay romantic drama that one would expect to see from Focus Features, the studio that brought us Ang Lee’s “Brokeback Mountain.” The mixture of traditional folk songs’ simple, direct emotion with a very British form of interpersonal emotional restraint feels like a winning one on paper, but on film, it doesn’t quite work, mainly because of how expected Shattuck’s story is. The film hits every standard beat audiences have come to expect from this genre, which doesn’t necessarily mean that it won’t work for a wide swath of viewers, but it does mean that the film has to work harder in order to get those emotional beats to land. Unfortunately, Hermanus sticks to the prescribed script too closely, leaning into the expected instead of attempting to freshen up the screenplay’s formulaic structure.
This works, up to a point – the film looks beautiful, with handsome costume and production design shot by cinematographer Alexander Dynan with a golden glow that instantly marks the film as a Prestige Picture. The overall tone is suffused with a melancholy restraint that fits beautifully alongside the old folk songs that provide the bulk of the film’s musical accompaniment. In the first half, when Lionel and David are feeling each other out and going on their song-collecting expedition, the film cultivates a captivating aura unlike anything else, a window on several American subcultures that are underexplored on film. The songs are gorgeous, sung with plaintive longing by wonderfully talented singers, and the film’s musical score channels that same passionate emotion through romantic strings. The film soars whenever it focuses on music, but given the opening monologue about how Lionel can see and feel sound, it’s frustrating that Hermanus never takes the risk the characters do in being with each other to actually show us what Lionel sees. The film constantly chooses to tell the audience when it could show them, a failure of nerve in the film’s adaptation to the screen.
Hermanus is at least tremendously keyed into the performances, weaponizing shot scales and camera movement to emphasize the characters’ emotional states. Mescal and O’Connor’s chemistry is reserved but powerful, providing such sweet release when they finally kiss and sleep together that you wish there were more intimate physicality shared between the characters. If O’Connor’s easy charm pushes the narrative forward, then Mescal’s complex interiority provides the film’s anchor, grounding the romance in a palpable connection between two complicated individuals. Unfortunately, Mescal tightens up too much when the film needs him most, becoming so restrained in the film’s last act that he loses all signs of life. Lionel is absolutely suffering at this point in the narrative. Still, since this is also where the film is at its most clichéd, we know exactly what to expect, meaning that Mescal’s bare-minimum display of emotion saps the film of what little it has left, leaving the audience with a series of supposedly emotional plot developments that are met with stone-faced blankness onscreen. While the film has put in the work over its first half to make an emotional climax land, it can’t do so because every plot development can be seen coming from a mile away, and there’s no emotion from the characters onscreen. The performers that fare best in the film’s second half are those who first appear then – Chris Cooper is affecting as the older Lionel in the film’s extended coda. Emma Canning and Hadley Robinson are shattering as Lionel’s girlfriend and David’s wife, respectively. The two actresses deliver their stale dialogue with perfect timing, surprisingly landing the most emotional beats of the film with their well-calibrated devastation.
When it comes time for the film to tie everything together in its final moments, Hermanus tries his best to connect the romance and the music satisfyingly and almost gets there. Setting everything to a monologue given by the older Lionel as he looks back on his life would have more impact if the film’s emotional climax didn’t rest on a plot development the screenplay treats like a surprise, even though it’s obviously the one thing that the film has been building towards. Even in its most emotional moments, the film exhibits a restraint that keeps the movie from playing too broadly at the same time that it cuts the film’s emotional hook off at the knees. Sentimentality works on people differently, and there are undoubtedly audience members for whom this level of restraint will work like a charm. But given how expected the plot and character beats become in the film’s final moments, one can’t help but want something more to grab hold of. The film’s sense of place when Lionel and David are collecting songs in rural America is utterly transportive and feels fresh, but everything after feels so expected that it breaks the magic spell the film’s first half has cast. “The History of Sound” still has much to recommend, but the whole is significantly less than the sum of its (admittedly beautiful) parts.
