ON SCREEN: ONE MARRIAGE, TWO REVIEWS

Greg Bruce and Zanna Gillespie watch CODA

She saw

Nothing is more Greg than blubbering like a teeny tiny baby through a movie, then turning around and deriding the film for being formulaic, so uncomfortable is he with having emotions. It’s not that he’s entirely wrong about CODA, it contains some very well-worn storytelling tropes, even a “stop the car” farewell scene at the end but it is told so well that I forgive it any creative lack.

CODA has the broad appeal of a blockbuster movie — think Mr. Holland’s Opus vibes — but with indie sensibilities and a budget to match. The fact that creator Sian Heder has achieved that with a film about a deaf family is a triumph. It’s a classic comingof-age story with a unique complication: teenager Ruby (Emilia Jones) is the only hearing member of her family, who depend on her to be the interpreter in the family fishing business, but she wants to leave to go to Berklee College of Music. Every teenager wants to assert their independence, many feel their family doesn’t “get them”, but in Ruby’s case it’s true. Her family will never truly understand the thing she loves the most because they’ll never be able to hear her sing. It’s a heartbreaking premise in an ultimately uplifting film.

CODA does an excellent job of bringing the hearing audience into the deaf world by ensuring the three leading deaf characters have rich and varied inner worlds — they’re funny, they’re sexual, they’re frustrated with the hearing world and each other in different and layered ways and the actors are outstanding. Although it’s been overshadowed by the Rock/smith brouhaha, Monday’s Academy Awards saw Troy Kotsur, who plays Ruby’s father, become the first deaf man to take home an acting Oscar. His co-star Marlee Matlin was the first deaf person to win an acting Oscar, back in 1987.

American Sign Language is such a beautiful language, highly emotive and captivating to watch and I hope CODA ushers in a new era of more inclusive filmmaking in regards to disabled communities. I asked Greg if he knew what “CODA” meant and he began reciting the definition of “coda” to me and said I should be embarrassed that I didn’t know it. I said I thought that in this case it was an acronym. With absolute certainty and a hearty dose of disdain, he declared that I was wrong.

It stands for Children of Deaf Adults. Together, we’re everything that’s wrong with hearing folk.

He saw

There’s a crucial scene late in the movie where the main character is singing in an important and challenging situation and she starts signing to her parents who are sitting in the audience, unable to hear. It was such a moving and powerful scene, in which all the elements of top-notch emotionally manipulative movie-making come together: The music of Joni Mitchell, family, redemption, a disregard for social strictures in the face of love, lots at stake. With my head turned as much as possible away from Zanna, I blubbed like a teeny tiny baby.

Because I rarely cry in movies and am ashamed when I do, because I’ve been brought up in a soup of toxic masculinity, at the end of the movie, I said to her, in a condescending tone: “Did you have a good cry? Did you blub like a teeny tiny baby?”

“Why are you saying that?” she asked, her red face streaked with tears.

“Because I did,” I said, “And I’m having trouble dealing with it.”

The next day I asked why she thought we had both been so moved by the film given that it was formulaic and fairly predictable.

She put on a flat voice, as if to indicate she was reading the answer from a film studies textbook, presumably because she wanted me to know it was a dumb question: “Because it is a universal story told through a specific lens and that lens is one we haven’t seen before.”

Ironically, her answer didn’t actually answer my question. As so often happens when we’re discussing a movie, she was ignoring the counterfactual. I said to her, “It’s possible to imagine universal stories told through a specific but unfamiliar lens that don’t move us,” but I could see that line of conversation was over because she rolled her eyes and made a low, guttural sound that caused me to cower.

She began to draw a comparison between this movie and Jerry Maguire, but I argued that Jerry Maguire had been successful primarily because of Renee Zellweger, although now I think about it the cute kid was probably at least as important. A few minutes later she forbade me from mentioning in this review the comparison she’d made. “It’s not like Jerry Maguire at all,” she said.

CODA is now streaming on Apple TV+