Metacritic Film

Music Within

Starring Ron Livingston, Melissa George, Michael Sheen, Yul Vazquez, Rebecca De Mornay, Hector Elizondo, and Leslie Nielsen

MPAA RATING: R for language including sexual references, and some drug content

MGM
Comedy  |  Drama
93 minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters October 26, 2007

Richard Pimentel enlists in the Army for a tour of duty in Vietnam. During combat, the young recruit loses his hearing to a bomb blast, and has to deal with this newfound disability on his return to civilian life in Oregon. Richard discovers that his disability and the struggle to transcend it is a defining moment in his fight for what he believes in. When he tries to help his friends--vets like himself and others with disabilities--to get work in an environment that treats them with pity at best and disdain as a matter of course, he realizes that he can make a difference. Together, the friends experience the currents of those turbulent times, and the wild, joyful energy of winning through confrontation and humor. Without his hearing Richard is all the more prepared to listen to the message deep within himself, and to carry that message to the thousands of people whose lives are improved by the movement he helps organize. (MGM)

WRITTEN BY
Kelly Kennemer
Mark Andrew Olsen
Bret McKinney

DIRECTED BY
Steven Sawalich

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

53 / 100

Critic Reviews

70 Variety John Anderson
Helmed by Steve Sawalich, this real-life dramedy is anchored by Michael Sheen’s captivating performance as the severely handicapped, profoundly acerbic Art Honeyman.
70 Chicago Reader
Steven Sawalich directed with invention and heart.
70 The Hollywood Reporter
Livingston and director Steven Sawalich keep the character in constant motion, his dialogue sprinkled with humor and his energy contagious. The film also is surrounded by a crew of ferociously individualistic characters.
63 USA Today
Movies often don't do their stories justice, and that has happened again here. The main problem is a tone that jarringly switches from a kind of Forrest Gump-style narrative to a more generic biopic.
63 New York Daily News
The performances are all solid, but Sheen, last seen as Tony Blair in "The Queen," is so good in his incredibly demanding role that he makes the natural discomfort people feel at seeing someone so debilitated disappear completely.
63 Miami Herald
As with many biopics, Richard is seen as the perfect hero, a man who singlehandedly changed the way the United States treats its disabled citizens. That's a bit of a stretch.
63 Boston Globe
It's everything it ought to be: right-minded, well-intentioned, compassionate. But it doesn't rise above made-for-cable public service announcement, either.
63 Chicago Sun-Times
Just remember that its hero stands for countless others.
63 Chicago Tribune Jessica Reaves
Starts strong but eventually collapses under its weighty sense of responsibility.
60 Village Voice Robert Wilonsky
Sheen, like the movie itself, is trying too hard to inspire when the story doesn't need the help.
50 The New York Times Matt Zoller Seitz
A bad movie with a good heart.
50 New York Post
It must have sounded great on paper.
50 Washington Post
If it does nothing else, Music Within shows us how deeply Ron Livingston's amiable face can take us into a movie. But even likable mugs like his -- remember him in "Office Space"? -- need help from the movies around them.
50 Portland Oregonian
It gives me no pleasure to report that the Pimentel biopic Music Within plays like a well-intentioned TV movie.
50 Los Angeles Times
The result is that they never truly find the innate drama in Pimentel's story, instead simply recounting four or five decades' worth of events that shaped the man.
50 San Francisco Chronicle G. Allen Johnson
Rarely rises above the level of a TV movie.
42 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The combined efforts of three novice screenwriters fail to give shape to a life that was, although devoted to a noble cause, unexceptional.
42 The Onion (A.V. Club)
Sheen is often the saving grace of Music Within, thanks to an aggressively profane wit that gives an otherwise tapioca-bland story a little edge.

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