Sian Heder (2021)
I didn’t catch CODA during its brief release in British cinemas last summer. Keen to see Sian Heder’s film but not keen enough to sign up to Apple TV just to do so, I was grateful that BFI set up a few screenings this month in the wake of CODA ‘s Oscars success, and am all the more grateful now. The Academy’s choice as Best Picture of 2021 is certainly the most enjoyable American picture of the year.
Adapted by writer-director Heder from Eric Lartigau’s 2014 film La famille Bélier, CODA works to a tried and tested formula. A young person with a natural performing talent, in circumstances that militate against the talent’s fulfilment, eventually wins through and realises their dream – what might be called the Billy Elliot syndrome. The latter film was involving and individual thanks to a combination of specific context, a terrific lead performance and an exhilarating demonstration of the protagonist’s dancing gifts and graft. Heder’s film, whose central character loves to sing, emulates Stephen Daldry’s essentially by the same means. The pricking sensation behind your eyes. well before CODA reaches its moving climax, tells you that the formula, in the right hands, continues to thrive.
Of course, there’s a widespread view that CODA is much more than a likeable and entertaining movie because it draws attention to issues around deafness – specifically the experience of families with a single non-deaf member who is the others’ bridge to the hearing world. The main characters are the Rossis – father Frank (Troy Kotsur), mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin), son Leo (Daniel Durant) and daughter Ruby (Emilia Jones), Leo’s younger sister and the title character. Frank and Leo are fishermen in the waters off Gloucester, Massachusetts (next door to Manchester-by-the-Sea: Sian Heder consulted, among others, Kenneth Lonergan, who made the marvellous film named for the place, about aspects of local fishing practice). Ruby works with her father and brother on their boat early each morning before going to high school. It’s assumed by all concerned that, once she leaves school, she’ll work with her family full-time, helping Jackie to sell the fish as well as Frank and Leo to catch it.
At school, Ruby is derided by other kids because her family is deaf; to make matters worse, she sometimes smells of fish. Her only friend is Gertie (Amy Forsyth). Ruby’s not much of a scholar but she loves singing – which she’s always doing on the boat – and joins the school choir run by Bernardo Villalobos (Eugenio Derbez). ‘Mr V’, as he’s known, is a drama queen and a hard taskmaster but he knows talent when he hears it and Ruby, after a false start, begins to impress him. She and Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), the choir’s star male voice, are chosen to duet at the forthcoming autumn concert. Mr V also encourages Ruby to apply, as Miles is doing, for a place at Berklee College of Music in Boston. She’s attracted to Miles from the start and the feeling is soon mutual but Ruby’s interest in singing baffles her parents, especially her mother, and the idea of college is beyond the pale. Frank and Jackie can’t afford either the fees or to let Ruby go.
The film’s name neatly articulates the acronym ‘Child of Deaf Adults’ with the musical connotations of ‘coda’. Although its formulaic nature means that you usually know what’s coming, the performances and the distinctive family set-up consistently lift CODA, and there are striking, sometimes funny details. The concert duet is the Marvin Gaye-Tammy Terrell hit ‘You’re All I Need to Get By’ whose lyrics refer not only to Ruby’s growing attachment to Miles but also her sense of responsibility to the family (‘I’ll sacrifice for you/Dedicate my life for you’). When Miles comes to Ruby’s house to practice, they’re interrupted by the sounds of vigorous love-making in the next room, which Ruby enters to find her parents hard at it. Sitcom stuff and it’s unbelievable that the mortified Ruby wouldn’t get Miles out of the house instantly but the episode is redeemed somewhat in the awkward four-way conversation that concludes it: Frank and Jackie assume that the purpose of Miles’s visit can only be to have sex with their daughter. In an earlier exchange Jackie tells Ruby off for listening to music on her headphones at the dinner table, though she has no problem with Leo sitting there swiping through Tinder options. When Ruby objects to a double standard Jackie explains that ‘Tinder is something we can all do as a family’. These bits are comical enough but they also reflect a main theme of the story – her parents’ blinkered view of who Ruby can be.
Ruby later asks if her mother wanted her to be born deaf and Jackie admits she did: she feared they wouldn’t be able to connect emotionally if Ruby wasn’t deaf, as Jackie failed to connect with her own (hearing) mother. It’s an important revelation but what isn’t revealed in the conversation is significant too. If Jackie had answered that she didn’t want her to be deaf, would Ruby then have asked if her mother saw her unborn child’s predetermined role in life as go-between? Ruby must in any case feel this is what she’s actually expected to be. Her genial, loving parents’ assumptions are a vexing element that CODA badly needs. Her brother knows this is how the family works, and it frustrates him as much as his sister. When the Berklee College project looks hopeless, it’s Leo – in one of the film’s strongest moments – who desperately signs to Ruby:
‘You can’t stay here. They’ll keep looking to you for everything. … Let me do this! I got this! I’m the older brother and I get treated like a baby. … You’re so afraid that we’ll look stupid. Let [hearing people] figure out how to deal with deaf people! We’re not helpless! … Our family was fine before you were born. Go!’
The school concert eventually takes place on (believe it or not!) the evening before the Berklee entrance auditions. By now, Ruby has given up the idea of attending those, though Mr V keeps urging her to change her mind. Sian Heder handles the concert performance well. Ruby has some solo highlights before ‘You’re All I Need to Get By’ and we already know from their repeated rehearsals that she and Miles sing it well. Once the song is well underway, Heder therefore shows how Ruby’s family experiences it, by cutting off the sound. For Strictly Come Dancing fans, at least, this device lacks the impact of originality but it’s still effective – especially when Frank is transfixed by a woman in the audience who is moved to tears. When the family returns home after the concert he asks Ruby to sing the song to him again. As she does so, he places his hand on her throat to feel the vibration of her vocal cords.
The following morning, CODA launches into feelgood overdrive. Her parents decide that of course Ruby must go for the Berklee scholarship. The family dashes over to Boston, arriving in the nick of time. Ruby bumps into Miles, who tells her that he’s flunked his audition. (That was bound to happen: he’s a nice boy but his family, the polar opposite of Ruby’s, is materially comfortable and short on love.) Miles also mentions that Mr V has just left the building. When Ruby goes in for her audition, she doesn’t have sheet music for the accompanying pianist and is told she’ll have to sing a cappella. But wait … Mr V, alerted by Miles, has returned on cue and, since he’s a Berklee alumnus, the selection panel lets him take over at the piano. Frank, Jackie and Leo are told they’re not allowed to sit in on the audition but they manage to get themselves into the auditorium anyway, and no one seems to notice them up in the gods supporting Ruby. She sings Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’, beautifully. We hardly need the subsequent scene when the scholarship letter arrives and the whole family goes crazy, but we get it nevertheless.
Compared with the often sensitively played domestic scenes, and those between Ruby and Miles, the Rossis’ struggle to make ends is a bit heavy-handed throughout (like the miners’ strike bits in Billy Elliot). The local authorities, by imposing new rules and additional fees, drive some of the fishermen out of business. Frank decides to sell fish independently but it’s a struggle to get the venture going. One day, when Ruby is off swimming with Miles, the coast guard boards the Rossis’ boat after Frank and Leo fail to respond to ship horns and radio calls. They’re fined and have their licence suspended. At a subsequent hearing, the licence is renewed only on condition that a hearing person is on board at all times. It’s this which decides Ruby to give up the idea of college but, by the time her scholarship is confirmed, the family’s business has somehow taken off in a big way – enough for them to employ hearing crew and ensure an all-round happy ending.
Production notes for CODA that featured in the BFI handout for their screenings major on how Sian Heder and her team discharged ‘the responsibility they bore to accurately depict Deaf culture and American Sign Language’, recognising that ‘Many people born Deaf or hard of hearing view their Deafness as a difference, not a disability’ and that ‘being Deaf is a cultural identity’. (The use of an initial capital letter to underline such identity is now verging on ridiculous: I caught the tail end of this week’s BBC Panorama programme, ‘Obesity: Who Cares if I’m Bigger?’; the day is clearly coming when fat people will have to be Fat.) Heder’s film’s admirable, earnest mission may well be a main reason why CODA fared so well at the Oscars. (It also helped that The Power of the Dog, the long-time Best Picture front-runner, was increasingly, and rightly, seen as a strenuously arty drag.) But it’s the above-mentioned formula, in combination with Heder and her cast’s creation of characters both engaging and exasperating, which animates CODA – not its good intentions. Besides, advertising those intentions is bound to rebound on a director making a mainstream picture that needs light and shade, jokes and highlights. According to Wikipedia, the ‘depiction of the hearing child interpreting for her parents even in settings where professional interpreters would be required by the Americans with Disabilities Act, such as a court hearing and medical appointments, received widespread criticism as being misrepresentative’.
Emilia Jones, as well as singing very pleasingly and variously, builds a highly convincing portrait of Ruby: she gets across the sense of someone who, without being overly subdued, is clearly constrained by the role she has always been assigned. What the deaf actors convey is often extraordinary; this is especially true of Troy Kotsur, whose performance has been deservedly laurelled, and Daniel Durant, whose work as Leo has been relatively overlooked. The physical acting of these two is vividly eloquent. Kotsur doesn’t just have an expressive face and hands; in Frank’s more emotional moments, feeling is dynamically transmitted from his shoulders down to his fingertips. He and Durant, when their characters are really worked up, emit guttural sounds that are small yet intense. As Ruby is about to leave for college, her father utters a single word, ‘Go’ – repeating the plea that Leo signed in his earlier, differently powerful speech to Ruby. (A nice coincidence that the same imperative is spoken in the closing moments of Belfast, the cinema year’s other authentic crowd-pleaser.) CODA also demonstrates that voicelessness has its advantages. At one point of the high-school concert, Jackie and Frank Rossi (whose unabashed lewdness and profanity would likely make him an annoying cliche if he spoke) get a little bored with what they can’t hear on stage. Without spoiling anyone else’s enjoyment of the show, their hands discuss what to have for dinner.
14 April 2022
