The film adopts the perspective of a typical independent film. From the very beginning, it is the empty life of a middle-aged intellectual: the accidental death of the pianist's wife in the past made the university professor Watt hopeless. He just changed his teaching notes every year and made a fool of himself, put a name on the book of his junior colleague, tried to learn piano but never succeeded. For him, the passion and dream of life seemed to be gone. There is an empty shell left. However, when he went to New York to attend an academic conference and came to his New York apartment where he had been free, he found an African-American couple who was illegal immigrants living here. Out of good intentions, the professor let them continue to live here, and in return, Tarek began teaching Walt to play African drums. When the professor felt that life was full of color again, Tarek was caught and was about to be sent back to Syria. The professor began to run around with Tarek’s mother...
The atmosphere in the first half of the film is relatively relaxed and relaxed, and the second half involves immigration issues, which seems a bit heavy (for such a complex issue of immigration, the film is still too simple and warm). The biggest feature of the film is the combination of the white elite’s midlife crisis with the theme of immigration and cultural integration. The piano and African drums have become symbols of the two cultures in the film-the piano represents the traditional white elite culture; African drums symbolize the power of marginal culture. For the role of the professor, the metaphor is twofold: on the one hand, the African drum brings vitality to the professor, allowing him to come out of the isolated and personal loneliness, reconnect with life, and come into contact with love and hope; on the other hand, On the one hand, it is a metaphor for the crisis that contemporary America faces after 9/11. The characteristic of American culture lies in the integration of diversity. The fear and indifference brought about by 9/11 became the reason for rejecting foreign culture, losing the nourishment of marginal culture, the mainstream of the United States. How dry culture will become. The film has repeatedly shown scenes where people come to the park spontaneously and gather together to play African drums. That kind of human, friendly, and interconnected atmosphere seems to be the feeling that Americans need most after 9/11. The film reminds me of Saul Bellow’s novel "Rain King Henderson," a story of an American rich man who chose to go to Africa to be a rain seeker when he felt his life became pale and impoverished. At times, people often look for power in a culture full of primitive vitality. The end of the novel reads like this: "I think, now it’s my turn to start, so I keep running-jumping and leaping, running heavy, surging, with mixed feelings. In this quiet arctic gray world, excited An extraordinary speed on a pure white ground.” However, at the end of the film, only the professor was sitting in the subway, lonely but resolutely beating the African drum. The sound of the drum contained anger, enthusiasm, call and expectation.
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