Marlee Matlin – Movie Musings

Clumsy Pygmalion drama that very uncomfortably mixes its messages during its obvious plot points

Director: Randa Haines

Cast: William Hurt (James Leeds), Marlee Matlin (Sarah Norman), Piper Laurie (Mrs. Norman), Philip Bosco (Dr Curtis Franklin), Allison Gompf (Lydia), Bob Hiltermann (Orin)

Adapted from a hit Broadway play, Children of a Lesser God (its title plucked from Tennyson’s The Passing of Arthur – though, like much of the film, I’ve no idea what point it’s trying to make) was hailed as a landmark in disability representation. Truthfully, it’s possibly slightly more retrograde than Johnny Belinda (made almost forty years earlier) and certainly not as good a film, its plodding plot and confused message not salvaged by two excellent performances.

James Leeds (William Hurt) is a charismatic teacher, newly arrived at a New England school for the deaf. His mission is to encourage the kids to speak, as he’s convinced they will struggle in the world on sign language alone. He becomes fascinated with the school’s janitor Sarah Norman (Marlee Matlin), a recent student, whipper-smart but defiantly silent, speaking only through fluent, witty sign language. Determined to teach her to speak and open-up a panorama of new opportunities for her, James and Sarah start a passionate relationship that increasingly flounders on the language barrier between them and Sarah’s own insecurities.

The positives first: both leads are excellent. Hurt is dynamic, engaging and charming – so much so it’s easy to overlook what a dick his character is (of which more later). Hurt accompanies all his dialogue with fluent sign language (no mean feat) and convinces utterly as the sort of maverick teacher who wins minds while carrying a prickly ego from uninterrupted success and validation. Opposite him, Matlin (still the youngest winner of the Best Actress Oscar) is electric: defiant, unaccommodating, sensual and damaged but able to burst into a radiant smile of confidence. Matlin makes her prickly but sensitive, defensive but determined and passion bursts out of her.

These two leads display obvious chemistry (although Matlin’s later recounting of Hurt’s serious domestic abuse during their relationship, barely denied by him, casts an uncomfortable shadow over the film). This lifts an otherwise straightforward film. It’s awash with expected plot points and beats from a meet-cute, to growing passion, falling outs and reconciliation. Aside from a few under-water shots (Sarah feeling completely comfortable under water, where her hearing is the same as everyone’s), it’s flatly filmed (it’s not a surprise Haines lost out a Best Director slot to David Lynch for Blue Velvet) and would not have looked out of place as a TV movie-of-the-week.

However, it’s main issues are the plays it makes for representation, while presenting deafness as an obstacle where the onus is on the deaf people themselves to fit in as much as possible. For a film about two people struggling to find a middle-ground between sound and silence, it never once dares us to experience the world as Sarah does. From its insistent score onwards, sound is an ever-present. None of Matlin’s dialogue is subtitled (she speaks aloud only once), with all of it translated by Hurt. For a film about finding common ground, its not interested in letting us experience even a taste of Sarah’s world.

Would it have killed them to have one scene where, perhaps, we walked around the school hearing what Sarah hears (nothing)? Or a scene where James and Sarah speak only through sign, with captioned translation? Instead, without really realising it, the film largely vindicates James’ position that not being able to speak is an abnormality Sarah is sticking to out of wilful, self-damaging stubbornness, rather than a choice she is entitled to make to engage with the world on her terms.

Unpack this stuff, and suddenly the whole film is a confusing mess of unclear positions and perspectives. James’ maverick teacher – in true Dead Poet’s style he wins the kids over by being unstuffy – is peddling a message that the deaf kids would be better off, if they became as much like him as possible. The film never once comments on James ignoring the one student in his class immune to his charm, essentially exiling him from his ‘in crowd’ during class. Is this great teaching? James has an unattractive messianic complex and a large part of his initial interest in Sarah is based on an arrogant belief that he can ‘save’ her from life as janitor, expecting her gratitude in return.

This Pygmalion like set-up quickly demonstrates it has way less insight about the self-occupied arrogance of its teacher than Shaw. It becomes clear to Sarah, that her successes (and the successes of James’ students, who under his tutelage perform a song-and-dance routine at parents day) are seen as his successes. When she wows James’ colleagues at a poker night with her wit and skill, they praise him (right in front of her), which he soaks up with a smug pleasure. The film never quite puts these dots together, or sees the irony in James’ bored disengagement with her deaf friends or his giving up on explaining Bach to her.

Worse than this, James ignores her early comment that she doesn’t want to be made to speak (she tells him that, as a teenager, she used sex to silence boys who pushed her to talk). Despite his vows, he increasingly, insistently demands she speaks, and fails to recognise when she resorts to using sex to try and shut him up. The film never pulls him up his selfishness and pushy imposing of his views, its sympathy for Sarah not changing its quiet view that her own problems are a major brick in the wall between them.

The film doesn’t really question James’ arrogance, because it can’t shake its habit of viewing her a problem to be solved. It effectively endorses James’ view that she should adjust and change as much as possible. Is it really wrong for Sarah to want to live on her own terms, not other people’s? To refuse to perform as James demands?

In fact, much as the film wants us to dislike Philip Bosco’s rules-bound obstructive headmaster, he makes two very valid points: one, it’s not for James to decide what’s best for Sarah and it’s not appropriate for James to fuck someone who is both a junior member of staff and (effectively) his student. Children of a Lesser God doesn’t even try to explore the moral complexities of any of this, instead settling for the idea that a disability can be overcome if someone works hard, overcomes their own issues and defers to an inspirational teacher. Combine that with its plodding, unoriginal story and you’ve got a film that hasn’t aged well.

Surprise Oscar-winner is reassuring, unsurprising feel-good fare, charming but crammed with familiar beats

Director: Sian Heder

Cast: Emilia Jones (Ruby Rossi), Marlee Matlin (Jackie Rossi), Troy Kotsur (Frank Rossi), Daniel Durant (Leo Rossi), Eugenio Derbez (Bernardo Villalobos), Ferdia Walsh-Peele (Miles), May Forsyth (Gertie)

Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) feels like she has been working her whole life. The only hearing person in a deaf family, she’s both translator and interpreter. She works early morning shifts on their fishing ship with her father, the imposing-but-playful Frank (Troy Kotsur), and older brother Leo (Daniel Durant), and butts heads with her former-beauty-queen mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin). After graduating from high school, Ruby assumes this will be the rest of her life: until music teacher Mr Villalobos (Eugenio Derbez) helps her discover her gift for singing and, suddenly, a new future of Berkle Music College is possible. But can she balance the conflicting demands of her family and dreams?

CODA is an eminently likeable, thoroughly unchallenging film. If someone dumped a pad down in front of you and asked you to guess, sight unseen, what its main plot beats would be, pretty much anyone who has ever seen a movie would nail 90% of them. But it’s a well-told, charming small-scale story, with a positive perspective on disability and tugs heartstrings with the assured skill of a master. In the end it doesn’t really matter that nothing in it is remotely surprising, challenging or unexpected, because it delivers exactly the emotional response the viewer is likely to want from it.

It’s a film about communication. The Rossi’s need Ruby’s ability to hear, and her ease with spoken English, to navigate the world around them in the fastest, smoothest way. Ruby, meanwhile, is struggling to communicate her own passions, after a lifetime of adapting herself to her family. Unlike them, she wants more than a life on the docks. This guilty conflict with the family she adores ironically makes her constantly avoid communication both with her family and her music teacher (investing his personal time and money in her) about the pressure slowly crushing her.

These increasingly conflicted desires and choices form the film’s heart. Will Ruby make her own life, or stay with her family for as long as they need her? It’s not helped by the fact that her talent (out of all the talents in the world) is one her family can’t fully share in, meaning they struggle to understand her dilemma. (Her mother outright sees Ruby’s singing as nothing more than teenage rebellion – stating if her parents were blind, Ruby would have embraced painting). On top of which, Ruby’s genuinely loving (but insular) family have been her whole world for as long as she can remember.

The Rossis are vibrant and warm-hearted with a salty sense of humour and a stubborn independent streak. Jackie and Frank are so infatuated with each other (even after decades of marriage) they frequently engage in noisy sex (much to the embarrassment of Ruby, when a visit from a would-be boyfriend is interrupted by some extremely loud, bed pounding coitus from next door). They delight in teasing each other – from Leo and Ruby’s inventive sign-language insults for each other to the hilariously intentionally explicit sign-language safe-sex lecture Frank gives Ruby and her prospective boyfriend. But they are also a tight-team, seeing themselves as having to fight for their place in the world and discussing problems with the low income of the fishing business as a unit.

CODA is keen to establish the Rossis not as victims or people the audience should feel sorry for, but as a warm and loving family of everyday working-class Americans, who just happen to be deaf. It’s part of the film’s challenging of perceptions around disability. Frank continues a fishing business started by his father, which he intends to hand to his son, and (eventually) steps up to become a leader in his community. Jackie is a chippy, opinionated woman who still loves the glitz and glamour of her old beauty pageant days while getting stuck into managing the family’s new business interests. All of them are vibrant and romantic, sexual people, confident in themselves and who they are, far from the passive recipients of charity and help that so many disabled people in film have been.

But CODA dodges more challenging questions around disability. It never really engages with the implication that the Rossi family have got so used to having a full-time, free translator, that they have become disconnected from the world around them. I can’t help but feel there is a germ of a more interesting film here about the family (however inadvertently) allowing themselves to be cut off from others. They have let their ability to lip-read slip, filter all their communication with anyone outside the family through Ruby, and have grown so used to her manning the radio for their fishing business that they can’t run the boat effectively without her (leading to inevitable coastguard trouble).

It’s also had a knock-on effect in the fishing community: the other fishermen have clearly never had to really build a relationship with the Rossi’s (after decades, no one on the docks has learned even the most rudimentary sign language or any communication techniques like moving lips clearly when speaking). Jackie is outright resentful of the hearing wives of the other fishermen and neither she nor Frank can imagine actually running a business without Ruby’s to handle literally all the verbal communication involved. The closest the film comes to addressing this is Leo angrily telling Ruby the family aren’t helpless – they managed before she was born and they will if she leaves. But the film doesn’t want to explore the implication that the Rossis allowed themselves to slip into a comfort zone that ultimately proves isolating and even damaging for them.

CODA does get some good material from their struggle to engage with music (even if this is an uncomfortable cliché for some in the deaf community). There are well-staged moments, such as the Rossis attending Ruby’s graduation concert, where we “hear” what they hear (nothing) and need to judge the performance, like they do, from the reactions of those around them. A scene where Frank finally appreciates part of his daughter’s skill by feeling the vibrations of her singing is done with real emotional force. However, it cheats by feeding this into an off-stage conversion where the family switch (overnight) from hesitant to “all-in” for a classic last-minute-dash to get Ruby to her audition.

That’s representative of CODA shifting away from more complex, challenging themes and issues for a heart-warmingly positive tale, familiar from dozens of movies past. Saying that, Heder does a good job pulling together the familiar elements, and Troy Kotsur (Oscar winning) and Marlee Matlin both give emotionally rich performances as the parents. Ruby is excellently played by Emilia Jones – who spent months learning sign language in order to perform the part and improvise with the other actors. But CODA feels like a gentle, consensus film full of pleasant moments and reassuring insights that love will overcome, which perhaps explains why it won an Oscar in a year of more divisive films. There is nothing in it that could possibly rile you up or shake your faith in the decency of ordinary people. CODA is a film designed to wrap around you like a comfort blanket.