Film is Pwn

The Heart is a Drum Machine is an interesting if ill-defined documentary on the hopelessly expansive topic of music.  The documentary is at times fascinating and beguiling, though it dragged for unbearable stretches and actually felt tediously protracted despite clocking in short for a feature film at roughly 75 minutes in length.

 
The meat of the piece was dozens of loosely connected, at times rambling interviews with musicians of every variety about what music means.  The interview subjects appear to have been conscripted into appearing and defining “music,” which prompts often nonsensical rambling along metaphorically and often metaphysically lines about the power and worth of music without much planning or forethought.  The actors (e.g. Elijah Wood) and other non-musicians (e.g. producers) seemed to deliver a more keen insight into what makes music so singular and so extraordinary, whereas the actual musicians generally offered pithy clichés or anecdotes to describe their art form.

A perfect example of rambling, jumbled moments is when one member of the band The Cure — one of the precious few of the (I presume) trendy and hip bands/artists featured which I had actually heard of — is interviewed, sitting in a car and he discusses the great connection between cars and music and picking up girls (well, he converses on more than “picking up girls,” but this is a PG web-site, thank you very much). 
 
There are stretches of interviews with a black background where the music, the subject of the piece, sounds like two synthesizer chords stretched out into a disagreeable infinity.  This soundtrack is an odd selection for documentary on music with participation of approximately two hundred musicians, certainly one of whom may have wanted to lend their talents to the musical score. 
 
The memorable moments are all too fleeting, I regret to report.  The most compelling segments include deaf musicians composing music and speaking about vibrations, a brief visit with the Saw Lady (a street musician in the New York Subways), and bookend segments about the immortal “golden record” sent out into space with Voyager.
 
There are some headscratchers like the unfinished fragment with the psychiatrist who affixes patients to an elaborate apparatus that allegedly records the patients’ mental thoughts in terms of music to determine what sounds — taken from his own brain — will calm the patient at night in order to defeat insomnia.  Fascinating concept, right?  Unless I totally missed it, we never got to hear a sample of the sound, despite a long-shot of the placid, languid patient with as many gadgets and doodads hooked to his face as is necessary to revive Frankenstein.
 
Since there are so many different perspectives, ideas, and angles taken to explore the topic of music, there are quality moments contrasted opposite decidedly dull, pointless, and incomplete moments.  I think I detected the overarching theme that music is intertwined with life — the heart is a drum machine, after all — but what is it?  Coincidence?  Mystical?  Spiritual?  Interesting?  There isn’t a valid conclusion to be drawn, methinks, but there isn’t a coherent hypothesis even composed here.
 
The only word that adequately describes the documentary to me is . . . “interesting.” 

The Heart is a Drum Machine strikes me as the type of feature documentary bound to endlessly replay on the artistic and pretentious Ovation Channel for millennia to come, and, if your are inexorably drawn to the Ovation Channel such as I, The Heart is a Drum Machine could make for an intriguing oasis in the wasteland of mindless channel surfing on a Saturday afternoon.

–Lawrence D. Oso