Great cast, moderate story of hearing teen in a deaf family
★★
Based on a sample group of one, it’s possible to be grateful for the existence and, especially, the actors in “CODA” and still be frustrated by its gently shameless storytelling.
Good news first, and there’s a lot of it. Writer-director Sian Heder has cast her loose remake of the 2014 French hit “La Famille Bélier” extremely well. Emilia Jones excels as Ruby, the 17-yearold hearing daughter of deaf parents. The family members are working-class, insider/outsider figures in the beleaguered Gloucester, Massachusetts, fishing community. Ruby’s father (Troy Kotsur) and Ruby’s older brother (Daniel Durant) are barely scraping by, marginalized by the rest of the fisherman. Her brash free spirit of a mother, played by “Children of a Lesser God” Oscar winner Marlee Matlin, regularly exasperates Ruby, who is spending her high school years trying to stay as invisible as possible.
The conflicts are many and entirely resolved, never my preference in any kind of drama. Ruby, whom we hear in the opening seconds going to town on Etta James’ “Something’s Got a Hold On Me,” likes a certain shy cute boy (Ferdia WalshPeelo) who is taking choir. So Ruby enrolls, too, deeply inhibited at first, though the passionate instructor (Eugenio Derbez,) spies a miracle in the making.
Ruby must find a way to follow her dream all the way to Boston’s Berklee College of Music, if she can live with the guilt of bailing on her struggling family’s efforts to establish a fishing
cooperative. She has navigated two worlds her entire life. “CODA” finds a workable American backdrop to adapt the story from the French version.
Heder’s second feature, following her debut “Tallulah,” moves along, crisply, without a narrative hair out of place. For once the deaf community we see on screen isn’t patronized, or sidelined, even when the scenes between hearing characters, such as Ruby and her sexually propelled best friend (Amy Forsyth), take over for a while. Jones — a Londoner who took on a U.S. dialect as well as American Sign Language for this role — brings out the human being in the protagonist, even when the script feels more like bullet points in search of fleshing-out.
What’s missing are unexpected beats, some rougher edges, a few plot-undependent moments that bring us closer to the way these characters live, breathe and feel. The comedy sounds like comedy writing, medium-grade at best.
None of these questions take away from the satisfaction of watching actors this skillful do their thing.
I remember seeing the deeply expressive Kotsur play Stanley Kowalski in a vibrant Deaf West stage production of “A Streetcar Named Desire” 21 years ago, in Los Angeles, and I thought: Will the film and television worlds ever catch up and support talent like that? A generation later the answer is: now and then. Maybe.
On balance, it’s worth seeing despite its weakness for picking songs for Ruby to sing that reflect exactly what she’s hiding inside. Again, this is a sample group of one, but: Sometimes audience hearts respond more honestly to what’s happening on screen when the tactics aren’t quite so obvious.
MPAA rating: PG-13 (for strong sexual content and language, and drug use) Running time: 1:51
How to watch: Streaming premiere Aug. 13 on Apple TV+. Also premieres in limited theatrical release Aug. 13