If you were putting together a crew to rob somebody, a piano tuner probably wouldn’t be your first call. You’d want a driver, somebody who understands security systems, maybe a large individual who can discourage questions.
But a guy who can tell you what’s wrong with your Steinway? You’d probably let him finish working and show him out.
Tuner gives us a reason to reconsider.
A Talent He Can’t Turn Off
Its central character has unusually sensitive hearing, which turns out to be useful for opening things that don’t belong to him. It’s a clever connection between two occupations I’d never thought to put together, and it gives this crime story somebody interesting to build around.
Unfortunately for him, the criminals find him interesting, too.
Leo Woodall plays Niki, a young piano tuner working in New York with his mentor, Harry (Dustin Hoffman). Niki’s once-promising future as a pianist has been derailed by a sensitivity to sound that makes ordinary surroundings difficult to tolerate.
His work makes sense for him. It requires patience, concentration and an ear for tiny differences. There’s something satisfying about watching somebody do a specialized job well, even when you have no particular interest in doing it yourself. I don’t need to understand piano tuning to appreciate that this guy knows what he’s listening for.
Then somebody finds another use for that concentration.
The Wrong People Appreciate His Work
What I like about this setup is that Niki’s appeal to the criminals is very specific. They don’t need him to become intimidating or learn how to win a fistfight. They need him to listen.
That also makes his position uncomfortable. Being useful to people like this might sound preferable to being useless to them, but neither arrangement comes with much job security. Once they know what he can do, his talent stops being entirely his business.
And Tuner gives him a life outside that problem. Harry is his mentor, somebody with whom he shares a craft and a working relationship. Hoffman brings warmth to that part of the movie, giving us a reason to care about Niki’s days before the safes enter the picture.
There’s also Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), a composition student with whom Niki begins a romance. Music gives them a connection that has nothing to do with his usefulness to criminals. The further he gets into safecracking, the more he risks bringing that trouble into something he actually wants.
Those relationships matter. Otherwise, we’re just waiting to find out whether a lock opens.
He Was Already Good at His Job
There’s an appealingly modest idea underneath all this. Niki doesn’t discover that he’s secretly capable of something. He already knows he’s good at something. The trouble begins when other people recognize how much money they might make from it.
That’s enough to give Tuner a personality of its own. The unusual occupation gets your attention, but the complications grow naturally out of the person doing it.
You want his talent to lead somewhere good. You’d just prefer that getting paid didn’t require somebody else’s safe to be empty.
