The Sound of Violet (Wolf, 2022)
I once wrote an essay (since turned into a chapter in Inconspicuously Christian Film Criticism) asking whether Christian films were judged by a double standard.. I thought about that essay during the first twenty minutes of The Sound of Violet because I kept thinking, “this is exactly the kind of movie that some Christian production company would put out and then accuse the bad reviews of being because it was Christian instead of because it was bad.”
So I thought maybe I had a secular film that was as shallow in writing, with as underdeveloped characters as the most mediocre Christian films….but then the contemporary Christian soundtrack kicked in, and a side character makes some pointed remark about how Christians are something other than the bad examples of Christianity the culture sees, and I found myself in that Sisyphean valley of Christian criticism trying to articulate everything that makes it so bland rather than letting it simply slide into to the valley of well-intentioned bad art to be remembered no more.
The Sound of Violet is not the worst movie I have ever seen, but watching it all the way through is a grind and a chore. Shawn has autism and lives with his grandmother. He asks a prostitute out on a date. It’s one thing that he doesn’t pick up on what she is; it’s another that she doesn’t sense anything is off about him. The script drifts along at the level of sitcom misunderstandings until it is time to be about something else. Grandma encourages Shawn to keep looking for love and then suddenly becomes a Christian bigot, and then is just jealous. Shawn asks all sorts of “innocent” questions about living what they ostensibly believe. He tries to buy Violet out of sex trafficking….she tries to send him away for his own good but also decides she loves him.
There is, paradoxically, enough story here for like two to three seasons of The Good Doctor, but the characters are so one-dimensional that the film appears to flounder when asked to provide any secondary features of them beyond the single adjective identifiers that would fit on a pitch card: autistic, prostitute, grandmother, pimp, boss, It’s almost as though the film assumes that the premise is so novel that we’ll be blown away by the situation. But situations are little more than drama’s scaffolding…they require walls and furniture and, most of all, people to abide in them.
Other parts of The Sound of Violet read like an informational essay on human trafficking.. “Every time I tried to leave, he threatened to kill me….I found out later the guy at the hotel had deals with the local gangs….Your a small operation, I’m moving on.” This is admirable after a fashion, but what is the story here? Where is the drama (as opposed to the pathos)? Perhaps the thing about the film that is most reminiscent of other Christian films is the inability to position it in genre terms. The film’s promotional material says it is a romantic comedy, but it’s not about romance (it’s about saving Violet from human trafficking) nor is it comedic. (The characters are so slow on the uptake that any potential for comedy is lost. The film is like a day-old helium balloon that bobs up and down, two or three feet above the ground. Yes, the element inside of it is the same as that which makes other products soar, but no, that element is not present in enough quantity to let it stay off the ground unless it’s being held up.
The Sound of Violet begins streaming on demand November 15, 2022.
