Grand Piano (film)

Plot

Tom Selznick was an up-and-coming concert pianist until he developed stage fright while attempting to play a complex piece, "La Cinquette". Five years later, he is slated to reappear in public for a comeback performance in Chicago, dedicated to the memory of his late mentor, pianist and composer Patrick Godureaux. Godureaux posthumously acquired massive media coverage due to the mysterious disappearance of his vast fortune. Selznicks return to the stage is due to the encouragement of his actress-singer wife, Emma.

Before the concert, a house usher hands Tom a folder of sheet music. In the folder, he finds the manuscript to "La Cinquette" and discards it. During the concert, Tom finds a note in his sheet music that threatens to kill him if he misplays a single note. Believing it to be a prank, he ignores it, only to find further notes that threaten Emma and a laser dot that tracks his movement. Disturbed, Tom leaves the stage, shocking the audience. He returns to his dressing room, where he receives a text that instructs him to locate and wear an earpiece so that he can communicate with the assassin, Clem. When Tom returns to the stage, Clem demonstrates his rifles stealth and range by shooting a nearby spot without alerting anyone.

Desperate, Tom surreptitiously uses his cell phone to contact his friend Wayne, who is in the audience. When Waynes phone goes off, it momentarily disrupts the performance, and Wayne leaves the concert hall. As he plays, Tom taps a text message to Wayne, but the usher, who is revealed to be working with Clem, kills Wayne. Waynes girlfriend Ashley goes to search for him, and she is killed, too. Clem tells Tom to look up, and Tom sees Waynes body on the rafters. Clem then tells Tom that instead of performing Beethovens "Tempest Sonata", as the conductor originally announced, he must perform "La Cinquette" flawlessly, as an embedded lock in the piano depends on a flawless performance. Tom insists he can only do so with sheet music.

During intermission, Tom runs backstage to find the crumpled manuscript, only to find the janitor has destroyed it. Tom feverishly listens to the piece in his dressing room and takes notes to help him remember. Norman, the conductor, announces Toms solo performance, but Tom interrupts him and nervously but firmly announces he will perform "La Cinquette", much to the delight of the audience. Clem warns Tom to pace himself, so as not to wear himself out. Tom plays the piece completely free of error, until he gets to the very last note of the piece, which he deliberately misplays, infuriating Clem. Tom retorts that the audience does not know the difference, and he receives a standing ovation, having finally conquered the piece. Tom ignores Clems shouted threats and introduces Emma. Much to her and the audiences surprise, he suggests that she sing a song as an encore. She reluctantly obliges, and Norman accompanies her. This gives Tom time to find Clem.

He races upstairs and finds the dead body of the usher. Clem chases him to the light fixture rafters, directly above the piano onstage. Their struggle causes a rivet to come loose, and to the horror of everyone in the concert hall, Tom and Clem come crashing down on the stage. Clem lands on the piano and is killed, but Tom survives. Emma rushes over to him, they embrace, and he says, "I think I broke my leg". Later, while waiting for their ambulance to leave, Tom sees the damaged piano loaded into a shipping truck. Inside the truck, he plays the last four bars of "La Cinquette" correctly, but nothing happens. Disappointed, Tom turns away until he hears the gears of the internal lock system turn and the sound of a metal key hitting the floor. He bends down to pick it up as the camera cuts to black.

Cast

Production

Elijah Wood had worked with a teacher three weeks prior to going to Barcelona and found it stressful having to play the piano and speak at the same time saying, "It was incredibly technical [...] lots of moments where it was jumping from where Id play, listen to a click, listen to music, have to be in the right place and the right time and hear dialogue and repeat dialogue".

Reception

The film was met with mostly positive reviews, with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 77% and an average score of 6.5/10, based on 57 reviews. The sites consensus states: "Grand Piano is so tense in its best moments — and appealingly strange overall — that it remains rewarding in spite of its flaws." On Metacritic, it has a 61/100 score (indicating "generally favorable reviews"), based on 20 critics. Todd Gilchrist of Indiewire said, "Grand Piano succeeds as a whole for the same reasons that Selznick does—namely, because Mira brings all of its elements to work together in concert, and then executes them like a virtuoso". Guy Lodge, writing for Variety, commented on the film, saying "this not-quite horror film is refreshingly blood-shy even in bloodshed, preferring to let the scarlet soft furnishings of a plush Chicago concert hall provide the red menace". Stephen Dalton, writing for The Hollywood Reporter, found the film lacking but said "it has just enough stylistic swagger to excuse its utterly preposterous plot". He also found praise in the performances of Elijah Wood, John Cusack and Alex Winter, saying, "Together they elevate a risibly ridiculous plot into something akin to a pulp symphony".