It's a little disingenuous to call Great World of Sound a comedy. Sure, it's got some wry humor, but it's also depressing as hell, an ambiguous story about soul-deadening ethical transgressions carried out in drab strip-mall America. Yet bleak as it is, Great World of Sound is also weirdly uplifting; written and acted with admirable subtlety, it shows without telling. Despite its echoes of Death of a Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross, I've never seen a movie quite like it.
Sound follows Martin (Pat Healy), a soft-spoken thirty-something starting a job with a small, shady record company. He's paired up, to comic odd-couple effect, with the boisterous Clarence (the excellent Kene Holliday — who is this guy, and why haven't we seen him before?) as a traveling "producer," but he's more of a salesman. The job entails convincing would-be stars (a remarkable range of musicians, including a shy girl with an oddly moving "New National Anthem": "Get your ass behind the singer/ I'm like Texas only bigger") to pony up a "commitment fee" towards the eventual recording and promotion of an album. The problem is, those albums don't seem to turn up, and Martin gradually develops a case of seller's remorse.
Great World of Sound doesn't push a message, but its themes are potent. The numerous scenes of musicians auditioning evoke the cruelty of American Idol. The vulnerability of the hopefuls is almost unbearable; it's like watching a lion close in on a baby buffalo. But Martin and Clarence may be on a different side of that relationship than they think. That's American idolatry for you. Maybe the "New National Anthem" says it best: "Some folks, they die for songs/ It's how they know that they belong." — Peter Smith