October 31, 2022 - 23:27
To me, one of the most important scenes of Sound of Metal was when Ruben sits on the metal slide in the playground of the deaf school with one of the deaf schoolchildren. Sitting there, he begins drumming on the bottom part of the slide and the child puts his head on the metal, feeling the vibrations on the slide. Personally, I feel like this is a really warm moment between Ruben and the child but overall, this scene to me felt like a turning point in the movie where Ruben begins connecting with children at the deaf school and the Deaf community he is surrounded by. In the scenes that follow, we begin to see Ruben use ASL and complete activities with the schoolchildren like playing games with them and even teaching them to play the drums. However, I would critique that the movie didn’t really focus on the process of Ruben gradually learning ASL, it felt as though he suddenly learned everything he needed to know about the language and there was no real marker of the amount of time that it took him to learn.
Here is a link to the scene on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm00Mk5dE3E