"Music from the Inside Out" has too many repeats

If only the craft of "Music from the Inside Out" was as spell-binding as the symphonies and waltzes its musicians play. Then, this documentary by Daniel Anker might have actually been a success. As it is, the pervading feeling during "Music from the Inside Out" is for the musicians to just shut up already and play their instruments.

"Music from the Inside Out" starts out with a vague premise: in the opening sequence,members of the Philadelphia orchestra are asked to answer the imposing question of "What is music?" Each stumbles and utters a few words, a pattern that will be replicated in the rest of the documentary. Despite trying to touch on three main points related to music — how the musician is an individual, how that individual relates to the group of the orchestra and how the orchestra functions as a whole — "Music from the Inside Out" deteriorates into a series of cacophonous repeats.

Anker seems to have forgotten that stating the same revelation ad nauseam does not make that revelation more true — it just makes it boring. When he interviewed the musicians for the film, Anker sat them all in the same room, and zoomed in on each for their individual quotes. This format led the musicians to agree with each other, adding on to each other ideas one after the other and never really offering anything new to the mix. The few times when an original thought peeks through is in the personal interviews that Anker conducted with a few chosen musicians.

In these sequences, the individuality and uniqueness of each musician comes through: There's David Kim, first chair violinist, who from age three was pruned to be a professional concert soloist, only to abandon his dream to be join an orchestra. Or a woman, who, in one sentence, mentions she's a synesthete — an intriguing point that Anker immediately abandons to return to the room of repetitive talking heads.

The film's saving grace is when these talking heads quiet down and put their fingers to the instruments they love. This is not to say the musicians aren't eloquent — they are — Anker simply had them say the same thing so many times that it deteriorated into just noise. But in the notes they play, the musicians' themes compliment each other, weaving in and out to form such a sense of passion to the screen that all the viewer wants to do is close their eyes and absorb it whole and untarnished by dialogue.

When the film ends and the credits roll, the creative geniuses who deserve the true applause for "Music from the Inside Out" don't come until the end. The composers' names, and not Anker's, are those that deserve true recognition. They knew what music was and expressed it more poetically and completely in rush of sixteenth notes than Anker ever did in the 90 minutes of his repetitive documentary.

"Music from the Inside Out" (90 minutes) is not rated; it is playing at Landmark's E Street Cinema.