Is Hollywood finally changing? In 1987, Marlee Matlin made history by becoming the first (and still only) deaf actor to win an Oscar, picking up best actress for Children of a Lesser God. This year Matlin is not nominated, but her film Coda is up for three awards: best picture; best adapted screenplay and best supporting actor for her co-star and on-screen husband, the deaf actor Troy Kotsur (he’s the leading contender after trousering the Bafta on Sunday).
On paper, Coda doesn’t look like a gamechanger. It’s a familiar-feeling, coming-of-age indie about 17-year-old high school senior Ruby (played by British newcomer Emilia Jones), a talented singer from a tightknit family. Ruby is torn between dreams of a music scholarship and staying in Massachusetts to work on her family’s fishing boat. The title is an acronym for “child of deaf adults”, and Ruby is the only hearing member of her family; her parents (played by Matlin and Kotsur) and brother are deaf.
Coda premiered at Sundance last year to a standing ovation, sparking a bidding war that ended with Apple forking out a record $25m. After that it seemed to run out of steam (blame the pandemic), dropping on Apple TV+ and limited cinemas in August 2021.
But in recent weeks, pundits have been speculating about its chances as a shock best picture winner – a potential spoiler to pip frontrunner The Power of the Dog. The comeback started when Coda bagged the big prize at the Screen Actors Guild awards for outstanding performance by a cast.
Still, there is some sniffiness out there towards Coda as best picture material: the feeling that it’s too blatant a crowdpleaser, machine tooled to leave viewers with a warm, squishy feeling. I get the resistance. The film doesn’t dig too deeply into its characters. You’ll recognise Ruby’s embarrassing hippy parents from a dozen past indies: Jackie (Matlin) and Frank (Kotsur) smoke doobies and have loud afternoon sex while she’s in the next bedroom. Her high school singing teacher is cartoonish Mr V (Eugenio Derbez), a typical inspiring disciplinarian who demands the highest standards from pupils.
So yes, it hits familiar beats. But Coda is a landmark in deaf culture and representation on the big screen. Writer-director Sian Heder (who is hearing) adapted the script from a 2014 French film La Famille Bélier, which controversially cast hearing actors. In Coda, the deaf characters are played by deaf actors – that’s three out of four of the leading roles.
When I interviewed Matlin last year, she told me she threatened to quit when a financier asked for a big-name hearing actor to play her on-screen husband. So the role went to veteran deaf actor Kotsur. The scene in which he tells a government fishing official where to stick it in expletive-filled American Sign Language (ASL), on its own justifies the win coming his way. (The captions can’t do justice to his sign: making his hand into a testicle that turns into a grenade, then pulling the pin).
And isn’t just the watershed value that makes Coda best-picture worthy. There are moments in it that have really stuck with me. In one emotional scene, Ruby asks Jackie: “Do you ever wish I was deaf?” Jackie sighs, and tells Ruby about how, when she was a tiny baby in hospital, the doctors gave her a hearing test. “I prayed that you would be deaf,” Jackie says, admitting she was anxious she wouldn’t connect with her hearing daughter. In another scene Mr V asks Ruby how she feels when she sings. She shrugs an inarticulate teenage shrug, thinks about it then answers in her first language, ASL. It’s gorgeous.
Half of the dialogue is in ASL. As well as casting deaf actors, Heder hired two directors of artistic sign language to collaborate on the script, Alexandria Wailes and Anne Tomasetti. There were sign language consultants on set, making sure the actors’ signing stayed in frame. One of them said that in a deaf house, the sofa would be facing the front door, so the front room was rearranged.
Can Coda really win best picture? The number-crunching awards geeks who take the Oscars as seriously as a presidential race think not. The statistics are against it. But it would be a popular choice. And the acceptance speech would be a corker. Here’s a taste of what we could expect, from Matlin’s acceptance at the SAG awards: “This validates the fact that we, deaf actors, can work just like anybody else. We look forward to more opportunities for deaf actors,” she said, before teaching the audience ASL for “I love you”. In the past Hollywood rewarded non-disabled actors giving sensitive portrayals of disability with awards love. A win for Coda would show that movies can reflect our changing world.
