Mark Reviews Movies: CODA (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 12, 2021

The girl has felt different all her life. At home, she's the only hearing person, as both of her parents and her older brother are deaf. At school, she's the kid from that deaf family, and certain classmates seem to take perverse glee in mocking her—wickeder still because they know she, unlike the rest of her family, can hear the insults, the noises, and the cruel mimicry.

There's a sad tragedy at the heart of CODA, although not because the family has three deaf people in it or because the girl is tormented at school for something she cannot help. It's simply because 17-year-old Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) feels like an outsider everywhere she is and goes. Whether anyone means it or not, that's how she's treated. After feeling that way for this long, it's becoming more and more difficult to communicate why she feels that way and how, intentionally or not, other people reinforce that feeling.

Writer/director Sian Heder's film does a lot of things right. It does give us three deaf characters, all of them played by actors who are deaf, and treats them, not as a joke or with pity or as something "different," but with perfect ordinariness (Some of this is an apparent improvement over the film's source material, a 2014 movie from France and Belgium called La famille Bélier, which cast hearing actors as two of the three deaf family members, but since it seemingly never received a release in the United States, the overall quality of the project remains theoretical). Heder's screenplay gives all of these family members a distinct and recognizable set of characteristics and goals. Even though Ruby is the driving force of the story and possesses the most development here, we understand the individuals within and the whole of this family unit.

The story creates drama, not from anything that has to do with the fact that Ruby's parents and brother are deaf, but from the fact that, on a more fundamental and emotional level, these characters have more or less stopped communicating with each other. Everyone here wants something. All of those needs and desires have continued for so long that they have become assumptions and expectations. The family is in a sort of routine—unquestioned and unexamined and, hence, seemingly unbreakable.

That's the course of life and families, regardless of one's inherent abilities or disabilities. In recognizing and exploring that element of this story, Heder has made a film that is both specific to these characters, as well as the particular challenges of a child of a deaf adults (the phrase that forms the acronym of the title), and universal in its underlying ideas, themes, and emotional impact.

For as long as she has been able to speak through vocalization and sign language, Ruby has also served as the unofficial translator for her family. This means that Ruby is a key component of the family business. Her father Frank (Troy Kotsur) and brother Leo (Daniel Durant) run a fishing boat in a small Massachusetts town, and every morning before school, Ruby is aboard the vessel, working and keeping an ear on the radio, and negotiating the constantly dwindling price on the day's haul.

Things are looking increasing bad on the financial front, and Ruby's mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin), a former model who nostalgically holds on to the old days, thinks it might be time to sell the boat. The stubborn Frank won't listen to such nonsense, because it's all that he knows. He won't listen to the ambitious Leo, either, who believes it's time for the family to start selling fish directly to customers. Frank thinks that's a terrible idea—too much extra work, too much difficulty in communicating with too many hearing people, too far away from the way things have always been for him and his family.

That last objection is the one that carries this story. It's mainly about Ruby, a talented but shy singer, who joins the school choir (on account of her crush, named Miles and played by Ferdia Waslh-Peelo), is championed by her singing coach Bernardo (Eugenio Derbez), and discovers that singing might be a way to go to college on a scholarship. Her parents don't understand any of this.

Jackie fears her daughter might not be any good at singing, so she discourages Ruby. Frank relies on Ruby to keep the boat and the business in legal and working order, so he insists his daughter continues going to work and attending business meetings, even if they're at the same time as Ruby's rehearsals and private lessons. Leo is supportive, but his reason for it goes a lot deeper and contains far more resentment than we might have anticipated.

In other words, the basics and thrust of this story are pretty familiar, but in keeping the focus on these characters and their conflicting wants/needs, Heder ensures that we're never quite certain where it will go, what these characters will learn (if anything) and decide, and how all of it will resolve. The drama here isn't about these external challenges and obstacles and misunderstandings. This story is, above all else, a human drama, in which one character's desires, fears, and dreams conflict with another's, which conflict with another's and so on, and we're left uncertain how any of this conflict can arrive at a happy or even reasonable conclusion.

The screenplay and the performances establish and develop so much about these characters that the resulting drama becomes richer, deeper, and far more emotionally resonant than the story's foundation might suggest. Jones gets at the melancholy heart and mounting resolve of Ruby. Matlin provides some classy airiness as the mother, and Durant gives us a sense of Leo's anger transforming into determination. Kotsur, looking rugged and weather-beaten, is wholly convincing and, more importantly, features in two scenes of utter beauty, as a deaf father longs for a way to comprehend (by looking at an audience) and feel (with actual touch) his daughter's singing voice.

There is some genuine pain and uncertainty in CODA, because we understand these characters, as well as how routine has come to define their lives and expectations for one another. All of that, though, only makes the moments of dramatic and human beauty all the stronger.

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