essay about the movie coda

At first glance, you might think that writer/director Sian Heder ’s “CODA” is all about predictable beats you’ve seen countless times before. After all, it tells a pleasantly familiar coming-of-age tale, following a talented small-town girl from modest means with dreams to study music in the big city. There’s an idealistic teacher, a winsome crush, moving rehearsal montages, a high-stakes audition, and naturally, a family reluctant about their offspring’s ambitions. Again—and only at first glance—you might think you already know everything about this feel-good recipe.

Caring, boisterous, and adorned with the hugest of hearts, “CODA” will prove you wrong. It’s not that Heder doesn’t embrace the aforesaid conventions for all their comforting worth—she does. But by twisting the formula and placing this recognizable story inside a new, perhaps even groundbreaking setting with such loving, acutely observed specificity, she pulls off nothing short of a heartwarming miracle with her film, the title of which is an acronym: Child of Deaf Adult. Played by the exceptional Emilia Jones (who is blessed with Grade-A pipes), the gifted young girl in question here happens to be one, navigating the intricacies of her identity, passions, and familial expectations, trying to reconcile them without hurting anyone’s feelings, her own included.

Admittedly, “CODA” is adapted from the French film “La Famille Bélier,” so the idea of it isn’t entirely novel. What’s new here—and it makes all the difference in the world—is the cast. While the family in the well-meaning original were played by hearing cast members (with the exception of the brother brought to life by deaf actor Luca Gelberg), they are all portrayed by real-life deaf performers in Heder’s movie—a sensational group consisting of legendary Oscar winner Marlee Matlin , scene-stealing Troy Kotsur and Daniel Durant —infusing her adaptation with a rare, inherent kind of authenticity.

Jones is the 17-year-old Ruby, a hardworking high-schooler in the coastal Cape Ann’s Gloucester who habitually wakes up at the crack of dawn every day to help her family—her father Frank (Kotsur) and brother Leo (Durant) and mother Jackie (Matlin)—at their boat and newly found fish sales business. Heder is quick to give us a realistic taste of Ruby’s routine. Accustomed to being her family’s sign-language-proficient interpreter out in the world as the only hearing member of the Rossi clan, she spends her days translating every scenario imaginable two ways: at town meetings, at the doctor’s office (one early instance of which plays for full-sized laughs thanks to Kotsur’s golden comedic chops) and at the boat where a hearing person must be present to notice the signals and coastal announcements.

What Ruby has feels so balanced and awe-inspiring that it takes a minute to recognize just how exhausting the whole arrangement is for the young girl, even though she makes it look easy with maturity and a sense of responsibility beyond her years. For starters, she is all too aware of everything private about her parents, often including their medical conditions and (to her riotous terror), sex life. When the hearing world becomes cruel or belittling, she steps in, almost with protective instincts, always prioritizing them over herself. But when Ruby joins the school choir and discovers her talent for singing, it throws off her balance and puts her at odds with her family, especially when she decides to apply to Boston’s Berklee College of Music, adopting a rehearsal schedule that often clashes with her duties in the family business. Complicating the matters further is a fellow singer and romantic interest named Miles ( Ferdia Walsh-Peelo from “ Sing Street ”), a shy kid with a genuine admiration for Ruby.

If there’s one misstep here, it’s how far Heder leans into the inspiring teacher trope with Eugenio Derbez ’s Bernardo Villalobos, a character that somehow transmits a sitcom-y artificiality in an otherwise earnest movie. Derbez does what he can with a collection of cookie-cutter dialogue lines, but his scenes don’t always land with the same honesty we see elsewhere in “CODA.” Still, this lapse in judgment feels minor in a movie so affecting, so in touch with its old-fashioned crowd-pleaser character. (Had it actually played in a physical version of the Sundance 2021 instead of its virtual edition, this would have been the standing ovation story of the festival.) And plenty of other types of sincerity throughout “CODA” make up for it, from the way Heder portrays Cape Ann and the life around it through lived-in details, to how she honors the joys and anxieties of a working class family with candor and humor, without ever making them or their Deafness the butt of the joke.

Most of all, she makes us see and believe in our bones that the Rossis are a real family with real chemistry, with real bonds and trials of their own, both unique and universal just like any other family. What Ruby’s chosen path unearths is the distinctiveness of those everyday battles. Would her sound-driven talent put a distance between Ruby and the rest of the Rossis? What would the world look like for the quartet if Ruby chose to leave? Through a number of deeply generous (and to this critic, tear-jerking) scenes—but especially a pair that play like each other’s mirror images—Heder spells out the answers openhandedly. During one, all sound vanishes while Ruby sings in front of her nearest and dearest, making us perceive her act from the point of view of the non-hearing. During the other, featuring a well-chosen track that might just melt even the frostiest of hearts, sound doesn’t matter at all. Because Heder ensures that we see the boundless love that’s there, in their shared language.

On Apple TV+ today.

Tomris Laffly

Tomris Laffly is a freelance film writer and critic based in New York. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC), she regularly contributes to  RogerEbert.com , Variety and Time Out New York, with bylines in Filmmaker Magazine, Film Journal International, Vulture, The Playlist and The Wrap, among other outlets.

• Emilia Jones as Ruby Rossi
• Eugenio Derbez as Bernardo Villalobos
• Troy Kotsur as Frank Rossi
• Ferdia Walsh-Peelo as Miles
• Daniel Durant as Leo Rossi
• Marlee Matlin as Jackie Rossi
• Amy Forsyth as Gertie
• Geraud Brisson
• Marius De Vries

Cinematographer

• Paula Huidobro

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‘CODA’ Review: A Voice of Her Own

An openhearted embrace of deaf culture elevates this otherwise conventional tale of a talented teenager caught between ambition and loyalty.

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By Jeannette Catsoulis

The template of “CODA” — the title is also a term used to describe the hearing children of deaf adults — might be wearyingly familiar, but this warmhearted drama from Sian Heder opens up space for concerns that feel fresh.

Ruby (Emilia Jones, delightful), a shy 17-year-old in Gloucester, Mass., is the lone hearing member of her rambunctious family. Between interpreting for her parents (Marlee Matlin and Troy Kotsur), and helping run the family’s fishing boat with her father and older brother (Daniel Durant) each morning before school, Ruby is exhausted. Since childhood, she has been her family’s bridge to the hearing world; now, her newly awakened desire to sing is perhaps the one thing they will struggle most to understand.

Weighed down by a groaningly predictable plot — which includes a cute-boy crush, a colorful music teacher (Eugenio Derbez) and a climactic singing audition — “CODA” relishes the opportunity to showcase the expressiveness of sign language. (The film is extensively subtitled.) The actors work together seamlessly, the blue-collar coastal setting is richly realized and the family’s cohesiveness solidly established. And if some interactions move to the clichéd beats of a sitcom, Ruby’s efforts to share her musical talent (notably in one lovely scene with her father) are remarkably affecting.

More than once, Heder effectively flips the film’s viewpoint to that of her deaf characters (who are all played by deaf actors). At a school concert, the camera watches Ruby’s family in the audience as the soundtrack abruptly cuts out, allowing us to glimpse the sometimes blanketing isolation of a silent world. In moments like this, when the quippy dialogue subsides and the story relaxes, we see the ghost of a more fruitful movie, one that would rather surprise its viewers than feed them a formula they have come to expect.

CODA Rated PG-13 for unrestrained flatulence and a bawdy mime. In English and American Sign Language with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. Watch on Apple + .

‘CODA’ Review: Sian Heder’s Family Drama Kicks Off Sundance on a Note of Enthralling Emotion

The story of a high schooler who's the only hearing person in her family, it's an authentic crowd-pleasing gem.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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“CODA,” which features three remarkable deaf actors, is most assuredly a crowd-pleaser, though in this case I want to be specific about what that means. In many ways, it’s a highly conventional film, with tailored story arcs that crest and resolve just so, and emotional peaks and valleys that touch big fat rounded chords of inspiration.

Yet the movie, written and directed by Siân Heder (it’s a remake of the 2014 French film “La Famille Bélier”), brings this all off with such sincerity and precision, and the film is so enthrallingly well-acted, that you may come away feeling grateful that this kind of mainstream dramatic craftsmanship still exists, and that it thrives at a place like Sundance. I wouldn’t want every independent film to hit you over the heart as squarely as “CODA” does, yet I wouldn’t want to live in a world where we don’t have movies like this one. In its straightforward way, the film delivers an emotional knockout. It’s a movie about a family, and by the end you may feel you know them as well as you know your own.

They speak in ASL, a form of communication the film treats with supreme neutrality, even as it gives the audience a de facto crash course in it. Frank, in particular, is a highly colorful and effusive signer, given to eloquently obscene kiss-offs that he spits out with a kind of percussive gesticulation. The signage, like any language, has its own music, and Heder, as a filmmaker, captures its expressive power as fully as I’ve ever seen it captured in a movie.

Troy Kotsur, from “The Mandalorian,” is an extraordinary actor, and here, with squiggly hair, burning eyes, and haggard features set off by a thick gray fisherman’s beard, he looks like Roberts Blossom with a touch of an ancient Frank Zappa. Frank, a pothead and ebullient curmudgeon, is a man of force and fury and, at times, too short a fuse. In his pickup truck, he pumps gangsta rap at top volume so that he can feel the rhythm through the seats, and he says things like “You know why God made farts smell? So deaf people could enjoy them too.” His fishing business is struggling, mostly because the middlemen on the Gloucester docks are squeezing the fisherman dry. But back at the large, messy, ramshackle house that Frank shares with his wife, Jackie ( Marlee Matlin ), a former beauty queen who’s as gnarly and argumentative as he is, and their two kids, the Rossis are a feisty, happy, settled clan. They support each other and know how to have fun, even if that means passing around Leo’s Tinder prospects at the dinner table.

At school, Ruby is a serenely well-adjusted if somewhat shy senior, with a best friend, Gertie (Amy Forsyth), who acts out the raunchy impulses Ruby is too cautious to consider. Ruby signs up for choir as an elective, and it’s mostly to be near Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), a shaggy cute dude who’s got the same quiet gracious vibe she does; the singing is secondary. But Ruby, in fact, has quite a voice, and when the choir teacher walks in, with his dandy beard and dour smirk and flamboyant accent, and introduces himself with R-rolling theatricality as Ber- narrrrdo Villalobos, we know just what we’re looking at: a teacher who’s going to be a stern taskmaster, a prize eccentric, and a straight-out-of-the-movies inspiration. Eugenio Derbez portrays him with a grandiose persnickety fervor but, beneath that, a note of unspoken sadness, and it’s an irresistible performance because it becomes a lifesize one.

And then there’s Ruby’s mom. Marlee Matlin plays her with a bracing blend of affection and cantankerousness, making her a bit of a pill, the kind of loving but overly cautious mother who doesn’t realize she’s using her fear to squash the dreams of others. Jackie and Frank have a robust sex life, but they fight like cats and dogs about finances. And Jackie’s relationship with Ruby is even trickier. Ruby, under Mr. V’s influence, wants to apply for a spot at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and Jackie, who already resents her daughter’s attraction to singing (“If I was blind, would you want to paint?”), is now terrified of losing her baby. These two have it out in a scene where Ruby dares to ask her mother if she wishes Ruby had been born deaf. The answer stings, but it’s naked in its honesty, and it kicks off the most wrenchingly emotional movie scene I’ve seen in quite a while.

Siân Heder, who came up as a writer and story editor on “Orange Is the New Black,” has directed just one previous feature (“Tallulah”), but she’s got the gift — the holy essence of how to shape and craft a drama that spins and burbles and flows. There are daring touches in “CODA,” like the way the school concert plays out (rarely have you heard silence this golden). And there are scenes that will stir you to the core, like the one where Frank listens to Ruby sing by holding up his hands to her vocal cords. As Ruby, Emilia Jones acts with a captivatingly authentic purity of feeling. Her Ruby is a girl of vibrant impulses, poised between Motown and the Shaggs — and more than that, between acting as her parents’ communicator to the outside world and communicating to them what’s really on her mind. All of them are great talkers. But the story the movie tells is about what it takes for them to hear each other.

Reviewed in Sundance Film Festival (online), New York, Jan. 27, 2021. Running time: 111 MIN.

• Production: A Vendôme Pictures production, in association with Pathé. Producers: Philippe Rousselet, Fabrice Gianfermi, Patrick Wachsberger, Jérôme Seydoux. Executive producers: Ardavan Safaee, Sarah Borch-Jacobsen.
• Crew: Director, writer: Siân Heder. Camera: Paula Huidobro. Editor: Geraud Brisson. Music: Marius de Vries.
• With: Emilia Jones, Troy Kotsur, Marlee Matlin, Eugenio Derbez, Daniel Durant, Ferdia Walsh-Peelo, Amy Forsyth, Kevin Chapman.

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Coda: Why this year’s feel-good favourite was the right Best Picture Oscar winner

In the chaos of awards season, the internet is starting to grasp wildly for the heroes and villains of this story. and it’d be wrong to dismiss cod’s best picture chances just because it’s a crowd-pleaser, writes clarisse loughrey.

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P eople love to argue about the Oscars , even when they’re not sure exactly what they’re arguing about. And awards season this year hasn’t exactly handed them a tidy narrative to work from – the biopics, like The Eyes of Tammy Faye and Spencer , are a little too self-aware to play as strictly conventional. The A-list-packed satire Don’t Look Up , and the lushly traditional musical West Side Story , fell by the wayside early on in the race.

Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast was the most obvious Oscar bait of the pack, but while Jane Campion’s meticulously directed western, The Power of the Dog, was an early frontrunner, it was Siân Heder’s Coda that ultimately walked away with Best Picture. Some saw this coming: the film had landed several crucial wins during the run-up to Oscars, including the Producers Guild and Screen Actors Guild. Coda , an honest and sincere drama about a hearing child in a deaf family, was something of an underdog when it first premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2021. The film received rapturous reviews and a healthy dollop of publicity, and walked away from Sundance with a record-breaking $25m acquisition deal with Apple TV+.

You’d think a surprise win like that would add some much-needed joy to a tumultuous, overall quite depressing, ceremony. But people are always looking for the heroes and villains to their story, and it seems like Heder’s film has become a prime target for a lot of the internet’s ire. And the backlash, for the most part, seems largely out of touch with the true, material impact of the Oscars. Ultimately, these awards don’t decide which individual films we remember in a decade’s, or two decades’, time. The Power of the Dog and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car will continue to be talked about in the ways they were talked about before. But they do frequently dictate the kinds of names, ideas, and faces Hollywood is willing to put its money behind.

It mattered when Parasite won, because it helped shake a little of the fear of subtitled films out of English-speaking audiences. It mattered that Chloé Zhao won for Nomadland , because it offered genuine hope that the barriers for women directors, and especially women of colour, were starting to break. And it matters that Coda won because of the doors it will open for other majority deaf casts.

It’s been frequently dismissed by commentators as a shallow crowd-pleaser, but the label only fits if you’re faithfully tied to the assumption that any expression of sentimentality should be equated automatically with naivete. There’s nothing slight or simplistic about Coda . The family at its centre – Frank (Troy Kotsur) and Jackie (Marlee Matlin) plus their kids Leo (Daniel Durant) and Ruby (Emilia Jones) – remain a stubborn, bubbling mess of conflicted desires and personal duties. Ruby wants to be a musician but, as the hearing child of deaf parents, positioned as their de facto interpreter, she worries that striking out on her own would sever one of their few concrete connections to hearing culture. Meanwhile, her father’s work in the fishing industry has come under threat of corporate interference, with 60 per cent of his catch now handed over to middlemen.

There’s nothing cutesy about the difficult choices these characters are forced to make between what they want and who they’ve dedicated themselves to. And Heder’s unfussy approach to the film allows her cast to craft a family dynamic that feels firmly grounded in experience, as they tease and argue, each gesture insulated by love. Coda allows its hearing audience only one moment of concession, as the sound cuts out midway through one of Ruby’s performances. Her parents, reading the micro-gestures and choked-back sobs of the other audience members, finally realise how gifted their daughter is. In a night where, as Best Actress winner Jessica Chastain remarked, the word “love” seemed to be commonly repeated – what could possibly be the harm in the Oscars wanting to reward something of that straightforward, emotional purity?

Find the full list of 2022 Oscar winners here . See the latest updates and reactions from the dramatic ceremony here , and read about the biggest talking points here .

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Review: 'Coda' is an emotional powerhouse and one of the year's best movies

Here’s the movie that restores the good name of the crowd-pleaser.

Here's the movie that restores the good name of the crowd-pleaser. You'll laugh, you'll cry and all steps in between at the funny, touching and vital "CODA," now in theaters and on Apple TV+. CODA stands for Children of Deaf Adults. It also represents the very best in family entertainment.

Having broken records with its $25 million sale at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, the Oscar-buzzy "CODA" also describes Ruby Rossi (breakout star Emilia Jones), a hearing Massachusetts high school student who lives with her mom (Marlee Matlin), dad (Troy Kotsur) and hotheaded brother (Daniel Durant), all deaf and all played by deaf actors.

Jones, a British acting and singing discovery, merges effortlessly into the role of an American teen growing up in a Gloucester fishing village. Ruby must, by necessity, act as an intermediary for her working-class family in the hearing world. The livelihood of her parents depends on it.

But what about Ruby's ambition to sing? When her choir teacher Bernardo Villalobos (a sweetly over-the-top Eugenio Derbez) urges her to try for a scholarship at Boston's competitive Berklee College of Music and pairs her with heartthrob duet partner Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo from "Sing Street"), romance and career start intruding on her role as family point person.

MORE: 'The Green Knight' review: Dev Patel deserves Oscar attention

The movie has great fun with mom and dad's rowdy sex life, especially when they use it to embarrass shy Ruby when she dares to bring home a boy. But Jones is tender and tough when she needs to be to show why the bond holds despite tension between Ruby and her family.

Still, the acting triumphs of "CODA" belong to the trio of deaf actors at its core. Hollywood has traditionally cast non-deaf performers in such roles. In the 2014 French film, "La Famille Bélier," on which "CODA" is based, both parents were played by hearing actors. Not this time.

Matlin, who won an Oscar at 21 for 1986's "Children of a Lesser God" (she's still the only deaf actor to do so) had the clout to insist on representational casting. She's a sparking livewire as Jackie, the loyal mom with an edge who calls other town wives "hearing bitches" and resents Ruby's music ("If I was blind, would you want to paint?").

MORE: Review: 'In the Heights' pure unleashed joy grabs you and never lets go

Ruby's brother Leo (an explosive Durant) is even more disgruntled when Ruby steps in to negotiate the best price at the fish market since Leo feels, rightly, that outsiders need to learn how to cope with his deaf family without cheating them in the process.

As Frank, Ruby's raucous dad, Kotsur is hilarious and heartbreaking. In one scene, he asks Ruby to sing just for him, placing his hands on her throat to feel the vibrations of her vocal cords in his fingers as she sings the Marvin Gaye/Tammi Terrell classic, "You're All I Need to Get By."

If that moment doesn't bring you to tears, an earlier one will have you reaching for a tissue as the sound drops out at a concert in Ruby's school and we understand what the Rossi clan experiences when the audience applauds a musical performance they can't hear or share.

Download the all new "Popcorn With Peter Travers " podcasts on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , Tunein , Google Play Music and Stitcher .

All praise to hearing writer-director Sian Heder, who learned American Sign Language to communicate with actors who give their soulful all. Not just with hand gestures, body language and facial expressions, but with the rare ability to connect heart to heart. However you say it or sign it, "CODA" is an emotional powerhouse and one of the year's best movies.

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CODA review: Tender coming-of-age Sundance drama earns its praise (and price)

This review initially ran out of the Sundance Film Festival in February 2021. CODA will be released Aug. 13 in theaters and on Apple TV+.

The Sundance Film Festival is still often a place for small unpolished gems. But CODA , which premiered there on Thursday night, is the kind of movie that seems to arrive fully formed — and has already been rewarded accordingly with by far the highest purchase price in Sundance history, $25 million by Apple TV+ . (Andy Samberg's existential rom-com Palm Springs set the record last year , with $17.5 million.)

Those staggering numbers seem at odds at first with the film's modest outlines — a classic coming-of-age tale, populated mostly by lesser-known actors and set in a small Massachusetts town. The charm in writer-director Sian Heder's breakout second feature is easy to find though, and much of it stems from the sweet specificity of her premise; British actress Emilia Jones (Netflix's Locke & Key ) stars as Ruby Rossi, the only hearing person in a deaf family.

The Rossis are a rowdy crew: Patriarch Frank (Troy Kotsur) and his grown son Leo (Daniel Durant), both tattooed brawlers, descend from a long line of local fishermen; they drink and smoke and make fart jokes, and when Frank's not on the boat, he's usually finding a way to have spectacularly noisy sex with his beloved wife, Jackie (Oscar winner Marlee Matlin ), a midlife sexpot in skinny jeans. Ruby rises every day at 3 a.m. to work alongside them, hauling in the daily catch before the sun is fully up. Then she pulls off her waders and heads to high school, where the mean girls make snide cracks about smelling fish when they pass her in the halls, and even her best friend Gertie (Amy Forsyth) can't understand why she wants to join something as deeply uncool as choir.

But music, which her family has no way of knowing — they can't hear her singing along to old Motown songs and Nina Simone while she works, or belting them out in her bedroom — is the thing that brings her the most joy.It also terrifies her though, so it takes a burgeoning crush on a classmate ( Sing Street 's Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) and the careful attentions of a teacher, Mr. Villalobos ( Eugenio Derbez ), to nudge her out of her skittish shell and closer toward the public performances she fears so much.

Heder, a writer and producer best known for her work on shows like Orange Is the New Black and Little America , never leaves any real doubt that Ruby will find her way when it comes to both first kisses and longer-range career plans. And CODA does often have the feel and scale less of big-screen moviemaking than of the television background she comes from, albeit expertly done (and with more than a few premium-cable profanities). But a handful of sitcom-ish moments seem like small glitches in a script that works so winningly to bring the often unseen (or just terminally under-explored) world of deafness to such joyful, ordinary life.

Jones — who trained intensively in voice work and American Sign Language for the role — has the gift of coming off like a genuine teenager, and more particularly a girl torn between her unique obligations to the people she loves and the bigger dreams she holds for herself. Matlin is great too, both tough and tenderhearted, though Durant and Kotsur deserve to be singled out for largely wordless performances that still convey so much in every scene: Anger, vulnerability, outrageous humor. Together, they somehow manage to make CODA feel like both the best and most familiar kind of family film, and one you've never quite seen before. Grade: B+

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How ‘CODA’ went from indie underdog to best picture Oscar

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From the moment it premiered (virtually) at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, “CODA” seemed destined for something special. The story of a high school senior (Emilia Jones) who is the only hearing member of her household, the movie deftly balances comedy, drama and a little romance to chart the ups and downs of everyday family life. And does so with the unique perspective of three significant deaf characters played by Deaf actors (Oscar winner Marlee Matlin, Daniel Durant and breakout actor Troy Kotsur).

It would go on to win an unprecedented four awards at the indie festival and was acquired by Apple TV+ for a record-breaking $25 million to launch on the streamer with a concurrent theatrical release. (And this is when movie theaters were still barely open due to the pandemic.)

Although its release in August 2021 was relatively quiet, the critically acclaimed movie stuck around through a competitive awards season and slowly but surely proved its ability to stand out from the pack. In January it landed Oscar nominations for adapted screenplay, supporting actor (for Kotsur) and best picture.

By the time it won the top prizes at both the Screen Actors Guild and Producers Guild Awards, it became the unexpected front-runner for the best picture Oscar.

“CODA” would go on to win exactly that prize, plus awards for adapted screenplay and supporting actor, at the 94th Academy Awards. Its journey — as tracked by The Times beginning at Sundance — sure has been sweet.

The beginnings: Ahead of Sundance premiere Marlee Matlin told us, ‘I hope it will create a tidal wave’

Oscar winner Marlee Matlin returns to the big screen in the Sundance Film Festival opener “CODA,” and she can’t wait for people to see it.

Jan. 28, 2021

The review: ‘CODA’ is the feel-good movie that will emotionally destroy you

The coming-of-age movie ‘CODA’ is a beautiful story of a teen girl and her loving, Deaf family.

Aug. 12, 2021

The making of the movie: How the ‘CODA’ team broke the mold

Groundbreaking Sundance hit “CODA” created a space for Deaf actors on-set and made the environment accessible for all.

Aug. 13, 2021

The director: Sian Heder shares the responsibility she felt to the Deaf community

Jan. 3, 2022

The breakout star: For Troy Kotsur, ‘CODA’ was worth the wait

Seeing co-star Marlee Matlin in a film reinforced the actor’s desire to tell stories as a Deaf man.

Feb. 22, 2022

The familiar face: Eugenio Derbez brings flair to tough-love ‘CODA’ music teacher

Popular Mexican actor finds similarities between children of Deaf parents and children of immigrants, acting as a bridge to communities.

Dec. 14, 2021

The craft: How subtlety of sound swells the emotional intimacy

The intimacy of the acting alone is moving, but the stripped down audio enhances the story — no distractions, only emotion.

The awards campaign: Is ‘CODA’ too sweet for the academy?

The film about the teen daughter of Deaf parents is both heartwarming and heart-wrenching.

Nov. 22, 2021

Making history: After Oscar nom, Troy Kotsur tells us, ‘Don’t limit yourselves, Hollywood’

‘CODA’ star Troy Kotsur is the first Deaf male actor to receive an Oscar nomination. He is nominated for supporting actor for his turn as Frank Rossi.

Feb. 8, 2022

The underdog victory: ‘CODA’ takes top prize at SAG Awards

Sian Heder and Apple TV+’s ‘CODA’ — which stars both Deaf and hearing actors — won best film ensemble at the 2022 Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Feb. 27, 2022

The moment it became a best picture frontrunner: ‘CODA’ wins top prize at the PGA Awards

The Producers Guild film prize has often been a strong precursor to an Oscar best picture win.

March 19, 2022

The impact: How ASL interpretation is being handled at this year’s Oscars

This years’ Academy Awards ceremony features three films prominently representing the Deaf community. Here’s how the academy is upping its game for ASL interpreting.

March 26, 2022

The big win: How ‘CODA’ won best picture

The feel-good family movie was viewed as an underdog but, in the end, its competition never stood a chance.

March 27, 2022

The acting award: ‘CODA’ star Troy Kotsur makes history as first Deaf male actor to win an Oscar

Troy Kotsur, who plays fisherman Frank Rossi in “CODA,” just won the Oscar for supporting actor. Read his full acceptance speech here.

The competition: In ‘CODA,’ ‘The Power of the Dog’ found the ultimate Oscars underdog

Siân Heder’s scrappy, jugular-piercing crowd-pleaser about a hearing teenager growing up within a Deaf family upsets Jane Campion’s brooding psychological drama, the clear-cut, pre-Oscars favorite for best picture.

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The chaos: Will Smith’s slap overshadows a historic night for women at the 2022 Oscars

Three women hosted, Beyonce busted open the show and Jane Campion, Sian Heder and Ariana DeBose had historic wins. But then Will Smith hit Chris Rock.

March 28, 2022

The day after: Marlee Matlin sees Deaf culture flowing into the Hollywood mainstream

After “CODA” wins best picture and co-star Troy Kotsur scores his Oscar, Marlee Matlin has a message for Hollywood and the film academy.

Bonus: What’s next for ‘CODA’? What we know about the stage musical in the works

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'CODA' Is An Unabashedly Formulaic And Lovely Coming-Of-Age Story

Justin Chang

The hit of the 2021 virtual Sundance Film Festival centers on a teenager who's the only hearing member of her close-knit family. CODA strikes some false notes, but it also delivers heartfelt emotion.

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CODA Movie Review: Heartfelt Film About Compassion and Acceptance

August 13, 2021 By Ashley Leave a Comment

One of the must see movies of 2021 CODA , a Sundance Film Festival hit, is now available to watch on Apple TV+ and in select theaters. CODA is the heartwarming, uplifting film the world needs right now. 

CODA Movie Review

Based on the French film La Famille Bélier, CODA tells the story of teenager Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones), a child of deaf adults. Unlike other teens at her school, she spends most of her time helping her family as their interpreter. Whether that means working on the family fishing boat or awkwardly explaining to a doctor about her parents' jock itch (Troy Kotsur and Marlee Matlin), Ruby is very much needed at home. What her family doesn't realize is that Ruby is a singer and not just a good one, a great one. With the encouragement of her choir teacher Mr. Villalobos (Eugenio Derbez) she begins to dream of a life beyond the fishing business. However, that dream would take her away from her family and her loyalty is tested as she tries to find a balance between their lives and living her own.

Ever since it's debut at Sundance, CODA has been winning over audiences everywhere and for good reason. Director and writer Sian Heder has managed to take the generic teen coming-of-age trope and make it unique. The endearing script combined with the performances of such an incredible cast make it impossible not to enjoy this film.

In a time when Hollywood is championing representation, disabled characters are often left out of the narrative. Or they are shown as helpless or in need of rescuing by their able-bodied costars. That is not the case in this film. Sure this family faces obstacles because they are deaf but that isn't what defines them. They are fully-realized individuals with emotional depth and the character development they deserve. 

The chemistry of this cast is everything. It feels as if you are watching a real family's story playout on the screen. Kotsur and Matlin shine as Frank and Jackie, the loving yet sometimes misguided parents of Ruby and Leo. As great as their relationship was, I enjoyed the one they have with their children even more. Leo (Daniel Durant) and Ruby's sibling bickering was the cause of more than a few laughs. While overall the closeness of the family shone a spotlight on the more tender moments. It is those times around the dinner table or early morning on the fishing boat where the Rossis capture the heart of the audience. 

It takes a bit to step out of the shadow of the main characters but Derbez does just that as the tough but fair choir teacher. He is Ruby's cheerleader, the one who wants to see her succeed. Essentially, Mr. V is a stand-in for the audience who wants Ruby to shine bright like the stars over the water. 

One of the best scenes in the film involves a heart-to-heart between mother and daughter. Matlin and Jones nail this impactful moment daring anyone watching not to tear up. Although all the cast deliver dynamic performances this really is Emilia Jones' film. She fully embodies the character of Ruby and gives an all out performance reminiscent of the breakout roles of Emma Stone and Saoirse Ronan. Just like those ladies, Jones' turn in CODA will have people talking for years to come. 

Heder's seamless blending of comedy and drama meant I was not expecting the emotional impact that hit me in the last 20 minutes or so of the film. Although in hindsight I should have seen it coming, considering 30 minutes into the film I was incredibly invested in the lives of the Rossi family, another win for Heder's direction and script. I sat with tears in my eyes watching as the movie wrapped up in a nice little bow. Sure some of those resolutions felt hurried and not quite earned. However, those quick payoffs did not detract from the overall massive heart of the story. 

This heartfelt film delivers an important message about compassion and being true to who you are. CODA is a window into a life that most of us have never lived. It celebrates inclusivity while making you laugh, blush, and shed a few well-earned tears. 

CODA is now available on Apple TV+. It has a runtime of 1 hour 51 minutes and is rated PG-13 for strong sexual content, language, and drug use.

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CODA – an uplifting drama on the power of communication

Powerful acting, musical performances, and ‘real’ depiction of deafness elevates this film

Updated 2 years ago · Published on 24 Feb 2022 10:00AM

by Haikal Fernandez

PEOPLE with disabilities in movies or shows are usually secondary characters, at best, and at worst they are the butt of the joke. Very rarely, if at all, are they allowed to be the focus of the story.

CODA, since its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival early last year, has won acclaim for its realistic (or at least realistic feeling) depiction of an average family of working-class Deaf Americans. In fact, it recently received three Academy Awards nominations celebrating this achievement.

At first glance, the plot of CODA is rather simple and has been done before. A small-town girl has big dreams that bring her into conflict with her family. But to think of this film in those simple terms would be selling it incredibly short.

For one, the daughter, Ruby Rossi (played by Emilia Jones) is the one member of the family, apart from her parents and brother, who can hear. This is what the title of the movie, CODA, or Child of Deaf Adults is referring to.

This means that even though Ruby is the youngest member of the family, she has responsibilities a typical teenager her age would not have. Namely, she speaks and hears on their behalf when they are out in the community. This ranges from ordering food at restaurants to helping run the family business.

What’s also special about the movie is its regional specificity in that it feels like a real place populated by real people. While it is a movie, it feels entirely believable.

The Rossi’s family trade is fishing, which family patriarch Frank (Troy Kotsur) stresses, has been a tradition since at least his grandfather. Ruby, Frank and her older brother Leo (Daniel Durant) work on the boat, and sell their fish to a wholesaler. Unfortunately, they and the other fishermen in the community are struggling to make a living.

While that adds some drama to the story, it is not the dilemma at the heart of the film.

From the very first scene, we meet Ruby we know she’s a good singer, a talent that her family is, unfortunately, unable to appreciate. At high school, she’s not the most popular person and keeps to herself, internalising years of being made fun of by being from the “deaf family.”

Volunteering for choir, she meets Mr Bernardo (Eugenio Derbez), a music teacher who sees something in her and decides to help her harness her talents. As is typical for these types of movies, he’s unorthodox in his methods, as he has his students sing 70s era Motown and R&B classics.

Ruby has to choose between furthering her singing ability, and eventually leaving to go to music school, or staying behind and helping the family business. It’s not black and white – the push and pull is palpable.

Despite the typical familial friction, the Rossis are a loving family, with parents Frank and Jackie (Marlee Matlin) still being physical in the affections. It’s just the very real barrier of their disability that doesn't allow them to understand their daughter.

CODA really hammers home the ability of communication to separate us, but to also bring us together. The Rossis other than Ruby might not be able to hear, and that restricts them from most other people, but it doesn’t stop them from getting the most out of life.

We get to see sign language used in both creative comedic moments, as well as powerful dramatic moments. The playfulness or the forcefulness of the hand movements can convey just as much as the tone or volume of someone’s voice.

Emilia Jones reportedly spent nine months learning American Sign Language, as well as taking singing lessons and learning to operate a fishing trawler, and the results speak for themselves in a powerful natural performance.

But the rest of the cast is equally capable of bringing their characters to life, with Troy Katsur earning the distinction of being the first Deaf male actor to receive an acting Oscar nomination.

As a small family drama, CODA’s power creeps up on you. It’s buoyed by genuinely good musical performances of great songs, as well as a tangible sense of humanity. It’s an uplifting film with genuine tearjerker moments that will leave you smiling. – The Vibes, February 24, 2022

CODA is available exclusively on Apple TV+

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• As a CODA (Child of Deaf Adults) Ruby is the only hearing person in her deaf family. When the family's fishing business is threatened, Ruby finds herself torn between pursuing her passion at Berklee College of Music and her fear of abandoning her parents.
• Gloucester, Massachusetts. As a Child of Deaf Adults and the only hearing person in her family, high school senior Ruby Rossi always has a lot on her plate. Indeed, trying to juggle back-breaking work on her father's fishing boat, schoolwork, social life, and the family's expectations can be too much for a teenager. But do her parents know Ruby loves to sing? When Ruby signs up for the school choir, singing becomes a passion, and suddenly, the talented young girl finds herself at a crossroads: should Ruby spread her wings and follow her dreams, or should she keep fighting everyday battles as a member of the proud Rossi clan? — Nick Riganas
• Ruby Rossi is a child of deaf adults (CODA) though has hearing herself. In addition her only sibling, her brother, is also deaf. She is her family's sign-language interpreter and helps out on the fishing boat. In her final year of high school she shows great talent as a singer and has applied to attend Berklee College in Boston. Where will this leave the family? — grantss
• In Gloucester, Massachusetts, Ruby Rossi is the only hearing member of her family: her parents Frank and Jackie and older brother Leo are all culturally deaf. She assists with the family fishing business and plans to join it full-time after finishing high school. Ruby auditions for the school choir, run by Bernardo Villalobos (or Mr. V), but when she is called upon to sing, she panics and runs away. She later returns to Mr. V and explains that she was bullied for talking funny as a child. Mr. V accepts Ruby into the choir after hearing her beautiful voice and encourages her to be more confident. Mr. V pairs Ruby with Miles, a fellow student, for a duet at the upcoming choir recital. Their first performance goes poorly as they each prepare separately; Mr. V insists that they get together on their own to practice. Ruby invites Miles to her house to practice, but they are interrupted by Frank and Jackie loudly having sex in the next room over. Ruby later hears classmates in the cafeteria mocking the incident behind her back; Miles apologizes for spreading the story, but she wants nothing to do with him. She eventually forgives him and they resume their practice while kindling a relationship. Meanwhile, Frank and Leo struggle to make ends meet with the fishing business as new fees and sanctions are imposed by the local board. At a board meeting, Frank stands and announces that he is starting his own company to get around the new restrictions and sell his fish on his own, inviting other local fishermen to join in. The family struggles to get the company off the ground, relying on Ruby to talk to people and spread the word. Mr. V encourages Ruby to audition for Berklee College of Music and offers her private lessons to prepare. Ruby joins him for the lessons, but becomes increasingly busy helping her family with the business. Mr. V grows irritated with her constantly being late and making excuses, canceling their lessons. He chastises her for wasting his time and accuses her of not caring enough about music. While fishing one day, Frank and Leo are intercepted by the Coast Guard after failing to respond to ship horns and radio calls. They are fined and have their fishing licenses revoked for their negligence; they appeal and manage to get their license back on the condition that they have a hearing person on board with them at all times. Ruby announces to the family that she is foregoing college and will join the business full-time. Her parents are supportive, but Leo reacts angrily, insisting that they can manage their own problems without Ruby's help. Ruby's family attends her choir recital, and while they cannot hear her sing, they notice the positive reception from the audience around them. That night, Frank asks Ruby to sing a song for him while he feels her vocal cords, growing emotional. The entire family then drives to Boston with Ruby for her Berklee audition; they are not supposed to enter the audition hall, but they sneak up to the balcony to watch anyway. Ruby is nervous at first but gains confidence when she sees her family; she signs along with the song so they can understand what she is saying. Some time later, Ruby is accepted to Berklee; she shares the news with her family and Mr. V, who are all excited for her, before asking Miles to visit her in Boston sometime. Meanwhile, the hearing workers in the family's fishing business have been learning sign language, allowing them to interpret for the family. Ruby's friend Gertie drives her to Boston for college as her family sees them off; Ruby signs "I love you" to them as they drive away.

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The Tension at the Heart of CODA

Even after two viewings, I’m still trying to answer a fundamental question: Who is this movie for?

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic , Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

In a 1993 episode of Seinfeld , Jerry dates a deaf woman named Laura. Naturally, George views Laura’s disability as something to be exploited. He wants her to read lips from across the room at a party so he can find out what, if anything, others are saying about him. It’s George’s gall, not Laura’s deafness, that’s the butt of the joke. But the episode is illustrative of a larger phenomenon: For decades, whenever disabled characters have appeared on-screen, they’ve typically been defined by their disability and little else.

Marlee Matlin, the deaf actress who played Laura, is part of the ensemble of deaf actors in the movie CODA . By now readers may be familiar with CODA ’s origin story: Filmed for a reported $10 million on location in Gloucester, Massachusetts, CODA won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, sold to Apple Studios for a record $25 million, and has since nabbed three Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.

Roughly a third of CODA ’s dialogue takes place in American Sign Language (ASL). Troy Kotsur, a deaf actor, delivers an exuberant, poignant performance as Frank Rossi, a deaf father. Frank is a fisherman, a family man, and a Lebowski-esque stoner who cranks hip-hop in his truck so he can feel the bass rumble on his butt. Kotsur steals scene after scene, and is now the first deaf man to be nominated for an Academy Award. Matlin is the only deaf woman to have ever received a nomination; she won for her role in 1986’s Children of a Lesser God .

Read: The little indie movie that deserves all the hype

I’m a hearing person, but as someone who lives with a pronounced stutter, CODA deeply affected me in its portrayal of individuals navigating the minefield of sharing the thoughts inside their head with people who communicate differently than they do. The first time I watched CODA , using the standard settings on my TV, captions appeared only when the actors were communicating through sign language. When I streamed the movie again, I turned captions on for the duration, which is how the film plays in theaters, something Kotsur noted when he accepted his Screen Actors Guild Award last month. During my second viewing, I tried to keep up with the spoken dialogue via the captions and found it fairly exhausting to do so.

CODA pushes back against certain lazy Hollywood tropes by giving its deaf characters layered interior lives. The production’s extensive use of ASL and its casting of deaf actors in deaf roles are milestones worth celebrating. But the deaf performers play supporting roles, and we’re principally following the journey of a hearing protagonist. Even after two viewings, I’m still trying to answer a fundamental question: Who is CODA for?

As the movie opens on an establishing shot of the family boat, Etta James’s “Something’s Got a Hold on Me” plays on a small radio, but only one person onboard is seemingly aware of that. Ruby (Emilia Jones) is the film’s namesake “CODA,” or child of deaf adults. Ruby rises before dawn each morning to work with her father, Frank, and brother, Leo (Daniel Durant), before heading off to school. We see her radioing to the coast guard and haggling with the guy who runs the fish market. One afternoon she serves as her dad’s interpreter at a doctor’s appointment while he describes a pubic rash in great detail.

Jones learned to sign for the role, and the scenes featuring her and her deaf co-stars are especially compelling. Time passes differently during these moments—the lack of audible dialogue forces the viewer to be more present. Without rapid-fire banter, you have space to notice an array of sounds around the edges of the movie: crickets chirping in the night, hands smacking during an ASL argument.

The first time we hear Ruby’s voice, she tells us—through song—that she’s on the precipice of change, and perhaps ready to put herself first. For Ruby, music serves as a source of both comfort and liberation. Early in the film, she skittishly joins the school choir. When Ruby’s instructor leads her in a vocal exercise of basic musical notes—“mi, mi, mi, mi”—what he’s really doing is giving her permission to say me . Jackie, Ruby’s mother (Matlin), doesn’t understand why her daughter wants to pursue music. In one gutting scene, Jackie asks Ruby, “If I was blind, would you want to paint?”

This is where CODA gets a little tricky. If you’re a disabled person, you may live with the nagging fear that your problem, your thing , is a burden to your family and friends. CODA doesn’t exactly dismiss that thought.

Generally, the deaf community’s response to the film has been positive. Gallaudet, a university for the deaf and hard of hearing in Washington, D.C., has embraced the movie and hosted screenings and a panel discussion with cast members. But the film has attracted some criticism as well.

Sarah Katz, a deaf writer in the D.C. area, told me that her initial excitement for CODA was tempered by “its focus on a musically inclined hearing character.” Katz found the Rossi family’s reliance on Ruby unrealistic at times, specifically during a legal hearing. In such a setting, the family would have had access to a professional interpreter. Katz said she wasn’t sure whether she’d endorse the movie for a fellow deaf person. But for a hearing audience, she said, “I would recommend CODA because it depicts deaf characters who seem, for the most part, authentic, with the caveat that deaf people are not as needy as the movie portrays them to be."

Liam O’Dell, a deaf journalist in the United Kingdom, told me he appreciated the way CODA ’s deaf characters disengage in certain social situations, especially crowded rooms—something he does himself. And yet he ultimately sees it as a story about “a hearing person trying to live in the hearing world” in spite of her deaf family, which he found troubling.

“I’d argue CODA is a film aimed more at hearing people than it is deaf people,” O’Dell said. “It’s just incredibly frustrating that they didn’t take that opportunity to say, ‘Hey, hearing people, here’s what you can be doing better,’ and instead [went] for, ‘Deaf people have all these access requirements that are so burdensome.’”

Some of these dynamics are addressed on-screen. Time and again, Ruby’s brother, Leo, tries to reject his sister’s assistance. He reads lips, he puts himself out there to join his fellow fishermen at the bar, and he attempts to do his own financial negotiating before Ruby steps in to do it quicker, faster, “better.” At one point, Leo nearly breaks the fourth wall during a fight with her: “We’re not helpless!” he signs, holding back tears. In this moment, Leo is chastising his sister, but also every hearing person who has ever patronized a deaf individual.

Another divisive aspect of CODA is the outsize role that music plays in the plot. Though music is not intrinsically antithetical to deafness—deaf musicians are not unusual; O’Dell is a drummer— CODA largely treats music as an exclusionary club for hearing people.

Read: Human hearing loss could be reversible

Ruby and her high-school crush, Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), spend much of the film working on a duet of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “You’re All I Need to Get By.” Each teen takes turns on the verses; Ruby sings, “With my arms open wide / I threw away my pride / I’ll sacrifice for you / Dedicate my life for you.”

The original version of that song is a conversation between two lovers, but here, we know that Ruby is singing about her family. Of course, get by is different from thrive . Ruby’s family is working-class, and she refers to her modest house as both “gross” and “disgusting.” Her bedroom ceilings are low and slanted, making her world seem even smaller than it already is. But Ruby has her bedside boom box, and her Goodwill turntable, and her voice. When she’s frustrated, she can scream at the top of her lungs, knowing, for better or worse, that no one in the house will hear her.

Every time the film veers toward pain or sadness, you can trust that a new song is coming around the bend. Central to CODA ’s appeal is its well-curated soundtrack (the Shaggs, the Clash), and the choral versions of hits from David Bowie and the Isley Brothers. Each song is a chance for you—and the film—to reset. But the you in that sentence refers mainly to the hearing members of the audience. In one scene, we hear the music of the film from the perspective of Ruby’s family. The silence is heavy. It hangs.

Even with its hearing protagonist, CODA helps normalize and destigmatize certain elements of disability. And large audiences are now more aware of talented deaf actors beyond Matlin, who has worked steadily since she won her Oscar nearly four decades ago. For her role as Laura, Jerry Seinfeld’s deaf girlfriend, she received an Emmy nomination—one of four throughout her career. Matlin was the first deaf actor cast in CODA , and she threatened to walk away from the production unless the producers agreed to hire deaf actors for the other deaf parts. Durant’s performance as Leo is especially powerful, and Kotsur may inspire a new generation of deaf performers.

I’m rooting for CODA at the Oscars, and Kotsur in particular. But I can’t stop thinking about the one line he delivers verbally. At the end of the film, Kotsur’s character, Frank, says, “Go.” He’s giving his daughter permission to leave the nest. That Kotsur speaks this line rather than signs it initially struck me as corny, until I thought back to my own pathetic exhaustion with reading the captions during my second viewing. If by the end of the movie you were too tired, or too lazy, to do the reading, you still could not miss this moment. Whether or not you agree with Katz and O’Dell that CODA is primarily a movie for hearing people, this particular line clearly is directed at—even caters to—the needs of a hearing audience member.

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CODA is a Moving Representation of the Many Varieties of Expression

Olivia rutigliano on the best picture contender.

“CODA” is an acronym which stands for “Child of Deaf Adults.” It is also a term in musical notation: a symbol which signals to musicians to jump to another section in the sheet music, to perform a variation on the music they have already played. Both meanings are relevant to Sian Heder’s joyful new film that takes this term as its title—it is the story of a teenage girl who is the only hearing person in a deaf family and therefore must constantly jump back and forth between different worlds of communication and expression.

To her neighbors in the fishing town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) is seen as her family’s American Sign Language interpreter: a bridge between her deaf parents and brother to the rest of the hearing and speaking community. She feels like an outsider at school and in the town at large for the ableist prejudice directed at her family, and she feels like an outsider in her family for being the only one with a different experience of the world. No one—not even Ruby—sees her bilingualism for the beautiful thing that it is, an endowment of two special means of self-expression. She (a teenager, after all) is urgently looking for a way to express herself and does not yet realize what she has at her disposal.

From the outset, CODA skillfully manages to represent its deaf characters not as disadvantaged for being deaf, while managing to illustrate the rest of the world’s complete incomprehensibility regarding what to do about their deafness. Some people see it as a problem, while others see it as an awkward inconvenience. The Rossis don’t care what the town thinks about them. But none of the film’s hearing characters, Ruby included, see ASL as an opportunity, or even as equal to spoken/heard language. In fact, Ruby understandably associates ASL with chores, draining tasks she doesn’t want to do.

Although she is a senior in high school, Ruby works on her family’s fishing boat with her teasing older brother, Leo (Daniel Durant) and her sardonic father, Frank (Troy Kotsur, in a charming, Oscar-nominated performance). Daily, she wakes up at 3 am and goes out with them—helping to fish as well as dealing with communications, from using the radio to haggling with the fish merchants who buy their catches. She accompanies her parents to doctors’ offices and orders for them at restaurants. She has been doing many of these things since she was little. Ruby is annoyed at her family—not for their deafness, but, like any teenager, for their needing her to do things to contribute to their household. And she also wants to be left alone to do her own thing sometimes.

A crush on a cute classmate leads her to sign up for choir class—fortuitous, since Ruby’s favorite activity is singing. She sings on the boat every morning, but her father and brother don’t hear her. The great Marlee Matlin, who was instrumental in making sure deaf actors were cast to play all the deaf characters, plays Ruby’s mom Jackie, and she wonders if Ruby is interested in music just to be a contrarian. But Ruby does love it, and she has a beautiful, soulful singing voice—which she reveals, slowly and shyly, to her new choir teacher, the peppery Mr. Villalobos (Eugenio Derbez), who allows the students to call him “Mr. V” because he is not interested in hearing his last name mispronounced. Although she is exhausted from her morning job and performs mediocrely in school, Ruby clearly has talent, and Mr. V takes an interest in her, offering to train her after school so she can apply to a prestigious music college.

But this move toward independence will clearly make things harder for her family—not only because they’ll be down an interpreter, but also because they’ll be down a hearing employee and they’ll have to hire a replacement. Mostly, the Rossis are baffled by Ruby’s eagerness to depart from their home in these several ways. Slowly, the film moves from a focus on communication in its practical mode towards a personal, parental one.

In the film’s most beautiful scene, outside in their yard after the Rossis have supportively but perplexedly attended Ruby’s choir concert (which is played partially without sound to share their perspective), Frank (who loves blasting gangster rap in his car because he can feel the beats through his body) asks Ruby to perform her solo for him, alone—trying to find a way to share and understand her passion, but also to figure out what he knows he missed during the formal performance. Delicately, he places his hands on her throat to feel the vibrations of her vocal cords as she sings. Kotsur’s face melts from serious, curious focus into awe at the power his fingers are registering.

CODA is a lovely film, and one of its greatest strengths is its painting “speech” and “listening” as merely two possible options amid a vibrant cosmos of articulation and reception types. As such, ASL is presented not as a means of communication which attempts to address a lack of hearing or speech; it is revealed to be a rich communication world all on its own, potentially even more evocative or effective than normative speech. ASL is more than a series of visual signifiers one makes with one’s hands—it is a complicated language that combines facial expressions, gestures, and other techniques, like speed and pressure and intensity, to communicate the emotional weight behind the words being signed. No scene winds up being more expository (and graphic) than the one in which Frank gives Ruby and her crush, Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) a surprise paternal sex talk. Ruby doesn’t translate, out of horror, but she doesn’t have to.

CODA is filmed simply, minimalistically, and this has the usefulness of allowing its profuse signing to become the visual focus—similar to the effect a black box theater space might have on a live performance. The film’s goal is to reveal how signing is even more intuitive, vivid, and emotional than “spoken words,” and it succeeds to this end, to a triumphant degree.

The film does not represent its deaf characters as hindered in expressing themselves by speaking in ASL, and it also represents hearing individuals as disadvantaged for not having ASL to speak with. In theater and film, when words are not enough to express a powerful emotion, characters often break out into song. In CODA , though, when spoken words are not sufficient to capture emotion for Ruby, she signs instead. When Mr. V asks her to tell him how singing makes her feel, she finds herself using her hands. For Ruby, ASL is a better fit to describe sensations, feeling, passion—and is therefore a better fit to describe the sensitive sensation of “singing.”

Ruby’s objective throughout the film is to make speaking, singing, and signing all harmonize together for her—and in doing so, reacquaint herself with the ways in which her family has inspired her unique voice. CODA is a sweet film, from beginning to end, but its sweetness does not minimize its radical obliteration of normativizations about language, communication, and disability: topics which, in mainstream film, are hardly ever spoken for.

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CODA Review

13 Aug 2021

If you were going to ask AI to come up with an identikit Sundance break-out hit, it might well be CODA . The winner of the festival’s 2021 US Grand Jury Prize: Drama (it subsequently sold to Apple TV for $25 million), writer-director Siân Heder’s film mixes up Sundance-favourite elements — family shenanigans, salty laughs, rough-hewn filmmaking, big dramatic beats, a feelgood ending — to winning, if not quite Little Miss Sunshine , effect. If it strays too close to the predictable, CODA tackles the realities of living with deafness with authenticity (the Deaf characters are played by non-hearing actors), empathy and heart.

The title is an acronym for Children Of Deaf Adults. The ‘child’ is Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones, who learnt American Sign Language for the role), an ostracised teen helping her Deaf father Frank (Troy Kotsur) and brother Leo (Daniel Durant) during hardscrabble days working in the family fishing business in Gloucester, Massachusetts. When we first meet Ruby she is singing gospel on board the boat and, joining a school choir, it transpires she has a beautiful singing voice, so much so that music teacher Bernardo (Eugenio Derbez) recommends she try out for the prestigious Berklee College of Music.

There is a palpable sense of the ways deafness can bring a family closer together.

Based on the 2014 French flick La Famille Bélier , CODA proffers a familiar dynamic of family commitment versus following your dream. Heder works wonders with the family part, creating a textured, vibrant and thoroughly likeable clan. Kotsur is an earthy but caring dad with a penchant for hard rap and bad jokes (“Why do farts smell?” “So Deaf people can enjoy them too”); Matlin as mom Jackie is not above guilt-tripping her daughter, but shares her fears about motherhood in an effective late-in-the-day scene; Durant as forever-on-Tinder brother Leo neatly evinces the frustrations of being older but less trusted than his kid sister. Scenes at the dinner table are lively, Heder making a fun use of signing-with-subtitles for comedic effect (“Twat Waffle” is a particular highlight) and there is a palpable sense of the ways deafness can bring a family closer together.

The film is on less convincing ground when it focuses on Ruby pursuing her dreams. Derbez’s Bernardo, Ruby’s music mentor, is an ersatz caricature, a well-tailored cardigan dropping one-liners and supporting-character lovability. The story beats are well worn here — will Ruby miss rehearsals over translating for her family? Will she fall for choir partner Miles ( Sing Street ’s Ferdia Walsh-Peelo)? — but you are carried along by Jones’ performance. She gives Ruby vulnerabilities, warmth and a spark to make you care for the character’s well-worn dilemmas, suggesting both the weight of responsibility she carries and her need to find her own place in the world. By the time she comes to the inevitable big sing-off, it’s a hard heart that isn’t moved by her performance, cinema’s biggest use of Joni Mitchell since Love Actually .

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“CODA” Is a Feel-Bad Feel-Good Movie

It’s meant, all too conspicuously, as a feel-good movie. But “CODA,” an Oscar nominee for Best Picture that’s playing for free in select theatres this weekend (and is already streaming on Apple TV+), had the opposite effect on me. The movie, written and directed by Sian Heder, is based on the 2014 French film “The Bélier Family”; it’s the story of the Rossis, a third-generation fishing family in Gloucester, Massachusetts. It focusses on one of the Rossi children, Ruby (Emilia Jones), a seventeen-year-old high-school senior whose parents, Jackie (Marlee Matlin) and Frank (Troy Kotsur), are deaf, as is her older brother, Leo (Daniel Durant). Ruby is a hearing person but fluent in American Sign Language, and her life revolves around the family business. She goes out on the boat each morning with Leo and their father, and, back on shore, negotiates the sale of their catch to a wholesaler who, they’re convinced, takes advantage of them as deaf people (and of Ruby as a child). The drama involves Ruby’s efforts to develop a life of her own, to break away from her family without breaking with it—even as she recognizes that her independent activities and her extended absence may threaten her family’s livelihood. It’s no spoiler, alas, to know that all comes out well in the end for all concerned. The narrative cards all come up aces, as is predictable from the moment that they’re dealt.

It’s an achievement of sorts—a display of craft that’s also a kind of craftiness—to establish a level of predictability that both guarantees a payoff and maintains a low simmer of suspense. The drama depends on sustaining a viewer’s rooting interest while keeping it unthreatened with the actual possibility of loss. It isn’t only the movie’s bright and perky tone that thrusts its characters risk-free into a risky world but also the contours of the drama itself, the kinds of events that are shown and the kinds that aren’t, the character traits that are defined (with the cinematic equivalent of Day-Glo highlighters) and the ones that are neglected. When Ruby is first seen on the boat, she’s singing along with a record of Etta James, and guess what: Ruby’s way out involves singing. In the hall of her high school, beside her locker, she stares at a boy she thinks is cute; in the next scene, students are signing up for extracurriculars, and that boy, Miles Patterson (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), chooses choir, so Ruby impulsively signs up for it, too. The music teacher, Bernardo Villalobos (Eugenio Derbez), a.k.a. Mr. V., quickly discerns Ruby’s unformed talent and picks her for the group’s featured duet—with Miles. The teacher also encourages her to apply to his alma mater, the Berklee College of Music, in Boston—but the private study that he’s offering to prepare her for her audition conflicts with her family duties at the dock. Yet, guess what: Leo, too, is impatient to exert some control over the family business without depending on Ruby’s assistance.

The convenient lineup of plot details extends beyond the foregrounded action into its psychological loam and its real-world implications. Can’t afford college? There are scholarships. Ruby is bullied? Suck it up, use it, and move on. The wholesaler is taking advantage of the Rossis? They start their own co-op. The other fishermen either ignore or mock Frank and Leo for their deafness? See what happens when the Rossis make them some money. “CODA” is a tale of the boundless bounty of personal initiative. The movie’s main villains are “the Feds,” federal maritime inspectors who intrusively impose on the entire fleet of fishing boats and bring charges against the Rossis for not having a hearing person aboard ship. It’s a cinematic, libertarian fairy tale, a genre that’s hardly unprecedented: Clint Eastwood doesn’t stint on his caricature of bureaucratic order, and will even do so in defiance of the history that he films, as in “ Sully .” But “CODA” doesn’t hint at the tragic sense of responsibility with which Eastwood matches his world view, or the symbolic imagination with which he evokes it.

The tale of work rewarded is also one of virtue rewarded, and its protagonists are defined by nothing but their virtues, of overtly calculated and oddly old-fashioned sorts. Frank and Jackie have an openly randy marriage (their loud afternoon sex turns into an absurd plot point), and the family gleefully talks dirty in A.S.L.; whereas Ruby, disdaining the sexual freedom of her best friend, Gertie (Amy Forsyth), all but proclaims her chastity. The discussions never go beyond the immediate practicalities of the family’s business (and, as for those practicalities, there’s precious little of them). Ruby’s amiable blankness is a template for grownup viewers to fill in with their own projections of what constitutes a good kid. Besides their tight family bonds and their narrowly defined social ones, the Rossis remain undefined. There’s no politics, religion, or culture, and the action takes place in isolation from ideas, points of view, reflections on life; its progress comes through the realization of sentiment, and its resolution of conflict comes mainly through the elision of any potential grounds for conflict.

On the other hand, the movie itself displays an authentic and significant merit, which is to offer large and dramatically vigorous roles to three deaf actors of extraordinary talent, and their performances give the movie a semblance of vitality and of presence that leaps beyond the confines of the script. What their performances reveal is the poverty of the commercial cinema at large (and, truth be told, of independent filmmaking, too) in the casting of deaf actors, of actors with disabilities. Yet, in “CODA,” the burden of labor falls entirely on these actors to suggest that their characters are anything but stick figures of goodness and honor and have a three-dimensional inner life. (Kotsur’s nomination for Best Supporting Actor is well deserved, for both the quality of his performance and the quantity of character-building that it demands.) Heder directs with a plain efficiency that lays the scripted events end-to-end and leaves out any feeling that the characters may exist between those scenes. The sense of cards, discrete and numbered, being turned over gets in the way of a viewer’s free perception and unencumbered thought. The movie is a litmus test of the willingness to be pulled along, from start to finish, staring straight ahead while being told that there’s nothing to see. The sense of calculation makes the journey feel like a lockstep march; the movie’s sense of a story that’s dictated rather than observed makes its good feelings feel bad.

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Bridging the Gap Between the Hearing & Deaf Worlds

‘CODA’ movie review: my thoughts on the latest deaf movie to be released

October 13, 2021 By Ahmed Khalifa

I have recently watched ‘CODA’ (which stands for ‘child/children of deaf adult), the latest movie only on Apple TV+, around a CODA who is struggling with the dilemma of helping her deaf family’s struggling fishing business whilst pursuiing her love of singing.

But with the moral obligations of helping her family, plus the pressure that comes with being a CODA, this movie follows the story of this journey and how complex it is for those in the real world too.

After watching it, I share my own thoughts and you can do so by watching the video below…:

…listen to the podcast here or on your podcasting platform of choice…:

…or read the transcript.

Transcripts

Now recently, I managed to get the time to watch a film called CODA. And CODA, if you are not familiar with it, it stands for child of deaf adult. And it’s a movie that’s available on Apple TV only available there.

It revolves around a deaf family where there is a CODA, of course. And she is keen to not just live her own life, but she could show in her own struggles of being a CODA.

So, long story short, 17 year old Ruby is the only hearing member of a family who runs a fishing business. And she has to wake up crazy early in the morning to help with the fishing business, then go to school.

Along the way she develops a passion for singing, and she’s having a love life, but that is complicated because she is a CODA and that kind of comes with its own unofficial responsibility, because you feel obliged to help your deaf parents and your brother, and your sister and whoever it is to live their life and to be the translator and the interpreter and connect the dot and connect the missing pieces between the deaf family and the hearing world, and that’s hard for a CODA.

That’s what the film is all about and I’m going to do a brief review about what I think about it, what are the problems and what you can gain from it.

In the buildup to the creation of the film, there were a few rumours about it coming out. And one of them was that the crew members or the people who financed the film, apparently they didn’t want any deaf actors at all. Because that’s what there is in the film, there are people who are deaf in real life and there are deaf actors, so quite authentic.

And you’d think that would make sense, but apparently the financier people didn’t want it to happen.

And one of the actors, Marlee Matlin, who is well-known in deaf community and a bit of a celebrity in her own way, she was adamant that it must be led by deaf actors. Otherwise, it’s not going to happen. It’s not going to be created. She’s not going to follow along with it. And it kind of went that way, eventually.

But it’s interesting that there was a pushback on the idea of having deaf actors, but the same time, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised because that tends to happen. Just get, someone in and teach him sign language for a few months. That would be fine. Nobody will notice. And then we just make money out of it. That’s kind of how it works, sometimes.

I personally agree that it should be authentic as possible. So it makes sense having deaf actors involved, and there are some concerned, apparently that the CODA, in this case, Ruby, the actor is not really a CODA in real life. And some people can tell that, apparently. I couldn’t tell because not only I’m not a CODA, but sign language is not my first language.

So I would not know whether that person is signing in the way a CODA would. Especially ASL, which is something that I have no clue about. I don’t know any ASL right now, at the time of recording anyway, but apparently it’s not authentic enough, but I don’t know.

I think it’s okay personally, because you get a hearing person to learn the sign language kind of like in real life, not the same. I get it. You grew up as a CODA. It’s different than learning sign language for a few months, but that was one thing that people were saying, but I don’t know. It seemed all right for me.

In terms of the actual film itself, I should point out, first of all, that this is all my opinion. Everyone will have their own opinion about whether it’s good or bad, whether it’s authentic or not, whether they think it should be released or not, whether they think it should be done in a different way, like any film, like any movie or film out there, you’re going to have differences of opinion. And that’s why it’s so important that I’m just going to share my opinion. It doesn’t mean that that is what everyone is thinking. It’s just mine only.

The general reviews seem to be very positive albeit its from different target market. But the main websites, like Rotten Tomatoes, they rated it 96% and on IMDB rated it at 8.1 out of 10. So very positive reviews. And I think I can see why, because there are a lot of kind of like warm, feel good factors and emotion, and trying to be so sympathetic to the CODA.

And I think I can see why a lot of people will say that.

Now I’m not saying it’s a terrible movie. I’m just saying that I enjoyed it more than I thought, but your view will depend on how are you looking at it as? You know, what angle you look at it as? But anyway, my opinion, I thought was a good fun movie. There’s a drama but there’s a lot of comedy around it.

But what I didn’t realise though, I thought it was an original film, but it was actually a remake of a French version called, ‘La Famille Belier’.

I haven’t seen the film. So I don’t know what it’s like. I can’t do a direct comparison. I’ve seen a trailer and it does look very similar in terms of the setup of it. The only difference is that in the French version, obviously it’s different kinds of people there, it’s run in a French farm of sorts. I think it’s a cheese farm. I’m not really sure. And obviously it’s also in French sign language.

What did you not realise that every country has its own sign language? Oh, well, well, no, universal sign language doesn’t exist . So that’s just how the world works.

But you will see the thing that a CODA goes through where she’s trying to be the bridge between the deaf family and the hearing world, and trying to make sure that the deaf family is involved, and has all the information and it’s kind of forced upon unfairly to be the official interpreter.

Even when you are in an awkward situation, like in a hospital where you have to relay the information from a doctor about the parents’, shall we say particular bedroom related health issues. And the CODA has to translate that. Imagine you doing that yourself for someone in your family – awkward.

But anyway, that’s kind of how it works in a lot of time in the real world, so, it kind of not get into that. And you look at Ruby into her own world, but then that interest in music and then develop a love life, you know, with a hearing person, and I think that gets complicated because she wants to get more into her music, but can she abandon her family, when their fishing business is under threat? It becomes very complex emotionally for her and the family. What do you do? Well, that’s the general story behind it.

As you can expect there are a lot of ASL. It’s always in frame so you can see all that in time when they are signing them, which is good because sometime I see in other places, they cut off when the person is signing in which is really not a good idea. And it’s very audible. And the majority of the time it’s audible until there was a scene when there was like a high school performance and she was singing.

And then you are suddenly into the mind of the parents who are watching their daughter, but because they’re deaf, they can’t hear anything.

So the silence then comes out and you don’t hear anything yourself when you’re watching it. I don’t know if that’s really genuine or authentic. I mean, there are different levels of spectrum in deafness world. So, if it’s really genuine where they both had complete silence, because a lot of the time you were kind of get like muffled sounds for a lot of people or some kind of, you know, sound that is different, not just complete silence.

So I don’t know if that’s a genuine theme really. I’m, curious to see what other people would think about that because it’s interpreted that they are completely deaf, where it’s like zero, you can’t like completely silent. There’s nothing coming in, but it’s very well-known that people can enjoy music because they can feel it or they can feel the muffled sound. And that’s what it’s generally like in the word.

So I’m kind of curious how is that really genuine, cause I’m not really sure. Let me know if you know yourself.

But there are certain things that is very authentic and the big one for me is in that same scene, when it shows their parents, because they can’t work out what the singing is, and they can’t hear anything, but they are very observant like any deaf person would and they look at other people’s reaction, their emotion, their body language. And you can tell that everybody is really emotional with the music that’s going on and they’re really loving it.

They’re getting all teary-eyed and they can see that and that’s what deaf people can do. They are very observant of people’s body language, and they can understand that. And that’s a really good thing to see. Genuine. It’s very very cool.

One scene that I quite like – it’s a bit emotional. And there are a lot of emotional scenes as well as comedy scene is when the father wanted to be able to hear his daughter sing. So he asked her to sing and he just felt her voice, her throat. And that way he’s able to kind of follow along with the music. And he got emotional about it.

And, as you know, nice little touch like that, it’s quite nice to see that relationship with the father and daughter, even though they’re very different, but they can still connect in that way in a more adjustable way. And that’s what I like to see in the world. Just adjust.

So I did enjoy the film. There were a variety of scenes that were quite funny and there were the bit of drama and emotion, but the one big thing that bothered me is that yet another film where it had to combine deafness with music. I’ve done the review about “Sounds of Metal” and that kind of covered that. But now it’s another one.

And it’s the usual thing about “how, oh my god, I’m so scared, I will not be able to enjoy music or I’m scared that I’ll lose my hearing. I’ll never be able to enjoy music” or anything along that line and it’s not very original anymore, because that kind of been done many, many times.

And it just, again, we’ve seen that and would want to see a bit more variety of themes and storylines, not just always about music and that’s it, because, yes, deaf people can enjoy music, play musical instruments, and we can do all that. And right now I play the guitar.

So, I can play music, but it’s just the same thing over and over again, and I think it’s been done. So it would have been nice to see a different storyline for such a well curated, well designed, well filmed film. And they put a lot of effort into it. You can see that, but it’s the same storyline. And I would have liked something different.

Obviously I can’t relate to the story. I’m not a CODA. My sign language is not to that level and I’m not profoundly deaf, but I can relate to other things. Things like being left out of a conversation and discrimination and feeling let down and being pushed into the deep end of the hearing world. I can relate to all of that.

But what I can do is I can validate based on my experience or seeing, or hearing from people who are CODAs themselves around the pressure of being a CODA and the burden that comes with it, because you feel a huge sense of responsibility and you are obliged to help your family.

But the thing is you shouldn’t be treated like an official interpreter, you should be treated as a family member, but unfortunately they are like an official interpreter, but that’s not the right way of doing it. You should have a professional doing that for them. It causes a lot of tension in the family when that happens.

So, being involved in that and then being told that you must be with a hearing person all the time, and the parent has to be with the child all the time. That’s a lot of pressure as well. That’s like a carer. So, that does happen in the real world and it does display that in the movie.

So, despite my little gripes with it, the whole music and deafness thing, I did enjoy the film, but I just would have liked something different and give it a shot. You know, you might enjoy it. Check it out on Apple TV and let me know what you think if you’ve seen it.

And I’m curious to know your thoughts, because like I said, this is my opinion only. It’s not based on what everyone thinks of different deaf people have their own different thoughts. Different CODAs will have their own thoughts. They might disagree. They may agree. These are just my opinion, but I’d love to know your opinion.

Let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear it.

And of course, when there are other movies or if you see other movies that would relate to this and I should review it. Let me know. I would love to be able to watch it and give my review of it.

In the meantime, I will speak to you again soon, take care.

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• Latest Posts

• What is ‘audism’? Plus my personal experiences of facing audism - October 27, 2021
• ‘CODA’ movie review: my thoughts on the latest deaf movie to be released - October 13, 2021
• Deafness as a ‘hidden/invisible disability’ - October 6, 2021

Ahmed Khalifa

Reader interactions.

October 14, 2021 at 10:30 pm

Watch this if you can. Same theme, but much better I thought: https://www.amazon.com/Love-Never-Silent-Mare-Winningham/dp/B001VK561Q/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=love+is+never+silent&qid=1634246989&sr=8-1

October 15, 2021 at 8:50 am

Thank you for the recommendation. This looks interesting. 👍🏽

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Deaf community responds to 'CODA': What the movie gets right and misses

When Troy Kotsur accepted his Academy Award for best supporting actor for his performance in "CODA" he became only the second deaf actor to win an Oscar — the first was his "CODA" co-star Marlee Matlin who won in 1986 for "Children of a Lesser God." In his speech he thanked deaf theater for helping him perfect his skills, screenwriter Siân Heder — and even joked he wanted to teach President Joe Biden dirty sign language. Then his speech turned personal.

“My dad he was the best signer in our family. But he was in a car accident and he became paralyzed from the neck down. And he no longer was able to sign. Dad, I learned so much from you. I’ll always love you," he said. "You are my hero."

After that touching moment he shared his historic win with those who helped him succeed.

“This is dedicated to the deaf community, the CODA community and the disabled community," he said. This is our moment.”

" CODA ," released on on Apple TV+ last year, has certainly sparked conversations in the deaf community. The film focuses on Ruby, a child of deaf adults, and her relationship with her parents and brother, all of whom are deaf. The movie also won Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay for Heder's work. Audiences also loved the movie and many appreciate that deaf actors play all the deaf characters, something that doesn’t occur as much as hearing people might believe.

“It’s absolutely fantastic that three main deaf roles are played by deaf actors. Marlee Matlin made that happen — when told that Frank and Leo (the husband and son) were going to be played by hearing actors, she insisted on deaf actors or she’d walk — and she deserves so much credit for that,” Jenna Fischtrom Beacom, 50, a deaf activist and writer in Columbus, Ohio, told TODAY via email. “Much of the interaction between the deaf actors is right on. I loved when Jackie (Marlee Matlin’s character) gets the attention of her husband and son at the concert by whapping them on the shoulder — that whole thing read as authentic and familiar to me in a way.”

Pop Culture 'CODA' actor shares how real-life moment with daughter inspired powerful scene

Having deaf actors makes some of the communication seem more natural, too.

“All three deaf characters are played by three actually deaf people,” Rikki Poynter, a 30-year-old YouTuber, writer and accessibility expert, told TODAY via email. “And when you get that right, the ASL is right.”

The deaf actors also used their own experiences in their roles, which added richness in some scenes.

“There were many incidental, probably unscripted moments that were authentic because the deaf roles were all filled with deaf characters, and the actors also provided feedback re: their own experiences,” Fischtrom Beacom said.

One scene that felt accurate to Poynter involves the family listening to “loud bass music, showing that one of the ways we enjoy music is through vibrations.” And, she appreciates how the movie tackles sex and disability in a way that most movies and TV shows don’t.

“Sex is such a taboo topic in general, but seems to be especially more so when it comes to disabled people,” she said. “I’m glad they did away with that ‘disabled people can’t be sexual or desirable’ nonsense.”

While the movie did some things well, there were moments that didn’t feel as realistic. Fischtrom Beacom thought that the main character Ruby used sign language like a “beginner” and some of the signing even among the deaf characters felt off.

“It was very clear that the dialogue was written by a hearing person. ASL and English are very different languages, with not only distinct syntax, grammar, etc., but also their own idioms,” she said. “There is overlap, and anything can be interpreted from one language to another but many phrases just don’t ‘work’ well when they’re supposed to be coming from culturally deaf-ASL users.”

And, the movie focuses on a plot point that might feel overdone to some.

“The ‘deaf people can’t enjoy music,’ stereotype that most music-and-losing hearing movies do,” Poynter said. “It’s so tiring.”

Poynter reviewed " CODA " for her YouTube channel, where she often reviews movies and discusses disability and accessibility, including her efforts to improve closed captioning. Even though the movie feels like inspiration porn, she believes it’s worth seeing.

“It’s not a perfect movie (is any movie though?) but I love Daniel (Durant) and Troy (Kotsur) especially and I grew up watching Marlee in things,” she said.

“CODA” has highlighted the need for better representation of deaf people and their stories and Fischtrom Beacom hopes that there’s room for more deaf writers, producers, actors and show runners.

“While actors are a huge part of improving deaf representation, they are far from the only part,” Fischtrom Beacom. “The writing in some ways is the most important thing; the decisions about what story is told and how to tell it.”

Being able to tell accurate stories about deaf people allows hearing people to develop a better understanding of deaf culture. Fischtrom Beacom shared an example: Most hearing people believe that all deaf people can lip-read and can do it from far away, in bad lighting or during a fast conversation, which is “utterly unrealistic.”

“There is a central conundrum that any deaf show or movie needs to appeal to hearing people to find real success, but hearing people generally know so little about deafness that what appeals is often sensationalistic or outside the deaf experience,” Fischtrom Beacom said. “I see some evidence that each success leads to something a little better.”

More accurate stories about deaf people can also have a positive impact on deaf people, hoping for narratives that reflect their experience. Fischtrom Beacom recently finished a young adult novel about a “newly deaf girl figuring out her deaf identity” with a magical and adventurous backdrop based a little on her own experience becoming newly deaf as a teen. And Poynter continues sharing on YouTube and streaming on Twitch.

“I grew up knowing next to nothing about deaf people, growing up alone and being the only deaf person I knew,” Poynter said. “Not being able to see people like me really had me feeling isolated. That’s why I made a YouTube channel 10+ years ago so mainstreamed deaf kids like me have someone they could see and relate to in some way,” she said. “It isn’t fun feeling like you’re some kind of ‘other’ when nobody else around you is like you.” Related:

Meghan Holohan is a digital health reporter for TODAY.com and covers patient-centered stories, women’s health, disability and rare diseases.

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Experience of growing up as CODA

According to the National Institute of Health (NIH), statistics show that more than 90% of deaf parents have hearing children. Those children grow up to be known as CODAs, Children of Deaf Adults.  

(This is not to be confused with ‘KODA’- Kids of Deaf Adults- those who are under the age of 18. When we refer to CODAs below, we include KODAs as the encompassing life experience is similar, just at different age brackets.)

Now, in recent years, the world of cinema has brought the captivating story of CODAs to the forefront, captivating audiences with its powerful portrayal of the CODA experience. One notable film that has resonated deeply is "CODA," brought to life by Apple TV. 

For those of you who have not heard of it, this heartfelt and critically acclaimed movie tells the story of Ruby, a CODA who finds herself torn between her responsibilities as an interpreter for her Deaf family and her aspirations to pursue her passion for music. As we delve deeper into the lives of CODAs, we draw inspiration from films like "CODA," which shed light on the intricate dynamics, joys, and challenges faced by CODAs, further igniting our curiosity and compassion for this remarkable community.

Whether you are a CODA yourself, a family member, or simply curious about the experiences of this extraordinary community, this blog serves as a platform to celebrate, educate, and foster greater understanding of the CODA journey. So, come along on this enlightening voyage as we embrace the beauty of both silence and sound.

What does it mean to be a CODA?

Born into a world where silence intertwines with sound, CODAs embark on a truly remarkable journey, shaped by their rich cultural experiences and the intricate interplay between two languages. For some history, the term "Child of Deaf Adults" (CODA) was coined by Dr. Robert Hoffmeister in the 1980s to describe individuals who grow up with deaf parents. CODAs may be hearing or deaf themselves, but what distinguishes them is their shared experience of being raised in a deaf household. They often serve as a bridge between the deaf and hearing communities, possessing fluency in both sign language and spoken language.

The CODA Experience

The CODA experience is shaped by the unique dynamics and culture within Deaf households.

• From a young age, CODAs are exposed to sign language as their primary mode of communication, which often becomes their first language. 
• The deaf parents are often found using American Sign Language (ASL) with their newborns starting with baby signs.
• The hearing child learns speech later as speech therapists and hearing family members provide auditory and verbal support and training.

They grow up witnessing the resilience, strength, and rich cultural heritage of the Deaf community. At the same time, they also experience the hearing culture through interactions with extended family, friends, and educational institutions. This duality in exposure fosters a deep appreciation for diversity and inclusion, and CODAs often develop a strong sense of identity rooted in both the Deaf and hearing worlds.

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Navigating Between Two Worlds

CODAs often say they have their feet in two worlds - the hearing and the Deaf. CODAs often find themselves navigating between the Deaf and hearing worlds, and this balancing act can be both challenging and rewarding. 

• They felt the pressure and burden of keeping their Deaf parents safe from dangerous situations that they could not hear, such as burglars, smoke alarms, or honking horns.
• They felt like they could get away with anything sometimes because their Deaf parents couldn’t hear them or bust them for doing something nefarious inside the house like stealing cookies from the dessert counter and claiming their innocence.

They may be called upon to interpret in various situations for their Deaf parent(s), serving as a communication link between their Deaf parents and the hearing world.

• One instance is when ordering food at a restaurant, the waiter could overly rely on the hearing child to help take down orders. 
• Another instance is at school when the teacher called a meeting not realizing the child’s parent(s) was Deaf. 

This role in the family can be overwhelming at times, but it also provides CODAs with valuable skills in communication, empathy, and cultural sensitivity. We want our children, hearing or Deaf, to grow up with a wide range of empathy and to some greater degree cultural sensitivity. 

Navigating between two worlds equips CODAs with a unique perspective that can contribute positively to both communities and to a more holistic worldview.

Challenges Faced by CODAs

While growing up as a CODA can be enriching, it also presents certain challenges. CODAs may encounter communication barriers between their Deaf parents and the hearing world, leading to a role reversal where they become interpreters and advocates for their parents . 

• They may face difficulties in social settings where sign language is not widely understood.
• Where they are the only ones with deaf parents.
• Where they are the only hearing ones in the room. 

These challenges can be emotionally and mentally taxing, as CODAs navigate their dual cultural and linguistic identities. But with time and experience, those situations become easier as they teach themselves to “code-switch” between the two languages naturally without a second thought. 

One of the other challenges faced by CODAs is the ability to protect themselves or their parents from insensitive remarks or comments made by a hearing person who assumed everyone in the family was Deaf. They can choose not to interpret in those particular circumstances, but it does not mean that they don’t hear the remarks and comments. This also deprives the Deaf parents of full access to what is being said, whether that was positive or negative. 

Parentification may or may not also be a concern as the hearing children feel responsible for caring for their Deaf parents through their role as the “family interpreter”. Serving as interpreters since childhood could be very tiring for CODAs. They may also feel traumatized and embarrassed while interpreting their parents’ experiences that are not appropriate for their age but this can be prevented easily with the use of professional interpreters in serious situations.

Benefits and Contributions of CODAs

CODAs bring a wealth of benefits and contributions to society. Their bilingualism, fluency in sign language, and ability to bridge communication gaps can be valuable in professional settings such as interpreting, translation, and teaching. CODAs often possess exceptional communication skills and a heightened awareness of nonverbal cues. Their experiences growing up in a deaf household foster qualities such as empathy, resilience, and adaptability. These qualities enable CODAs to excel in diverse fields and contribute meaningfully to their communities. 

CODAs often start deaf schools, become interpreters, teach ASL, and channel their expressiveness to excel in acting/theatre. 

Supporting CODAs: Education and Resources

To support CODAs in their unique journey, it is crucial to provide them with appropriate education and resources. Educational institutions should recognize the linguistic and cultural needs of CODAs and offer support services that cater to their specific requirements. Opportunities for CODAs to connect with other CODAs can be invaluable, fostering a sense of community and shared experiences and this is often done through events hosted by CODA-International . Additionally, access to resources such as workshops, counseling, and mentorship programs can aid in their personal and professional development.

What follows are some gentle recommendations for navigating life as a family with a CODA.

• First, professional interpreters should be used whenever possible for situations that might be inappropriate for the CODA to interpret such as adult conversation, legal issues, doctor appointments, and school matters. 
• Second, Deaf parents should make sure that they tap into resources and technology to help them achieve a sense of independence and the ability to be the ‘protector' in the household. Parents should have open and frank discussions regarding discrimination and give ‘what to do' suggestions to their hearing children when those situations arise. 
• Thirdly, and most important, Deaf parents should make sure that they teach their hearing child the form of communication that is predominately used by them. It is critical for the hearing child to be able to communicate his/her feelings with the parent and not just serve as an interpreter of the parent's feelings and decisions.

Growing up as a Child of Deaf Adults (CODA) is a multifaceted experience that offers both challenges and rewards. CODAs possess a deep appreciation for deaf culture and language while navigating the hearing world. They play a vital role in bridging communication gaps and promoting inclusivity. The unique perspective and skills acquired by CODAs contribute to the enrichment of both deaf and hearing communities. By providing support, education, and resources tailored to their needs, we can empower CODAs to thrive and continue making meaningful contributions in a diverse and inclusive society. 

Again, the journey as a CODA can be a transformative one, blessed with the opportunity to thrive in two worlds and develop a multicultural identity.

Stay tuned for upcoming articles where we explore further terminology that is used in the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community! You can find our previously published article about the term “hearing impaired” here as well. 

A passionate and dedicated English teacher who creates an inclusive and engaging learning environment, inspiring students to develop their language skills and cultivate a lifelong love for literature.

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‘Youth (Homecoming)’ Review: A Despondent Coda to a Rich Textile Trilogy

Shot over several years, “Youth (Homecoming)” rounds out Wang Bing’s meticulous documentary trilogy about the shape of China’s youth. At two-and-a-half hours in length, it’s the project’s shortest and most focused entry, offering a look at what happens once the rattle of sewing machines finally ceases, followed by a stark and surprising look at what unfolds once they start back up again.

While it’s hard to call each subsequent entry a “sequel” in the traditional sense — its subjects have thus far changed not only from film to film, but from scene to scene — the trilogy’s progression has been distinctly sequential. “ Youth (Spring) ” captured the growing pains of young textile workers at the start of the season; “ Youth (Hard Times) ,” meanwhile, followed their financial struggles in the summer, while the final entry captures the desertion of Zhili’s factories as the winter break approaches.

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Mechanical whirrs lure us into sweatshop spaces once more, only this time, they’re broken up by equally startling moments of silence. Logistically, this makes sense. The work has slowed down as the new year approaches, and many young laborers are trying to bargain for the compensation they’re owed so they can visit home. However, these alternating sounds and haunting echoes are disconcerting for another reason. They represent, in microcosm, the cyclical nature of this seasonal grind. Toil has so come to define these workers’ lives that it feels inescapable even in the interim. The silence is as deafening as the noise.

Unlike the first two films, which introduce dozens of new workers at regular intervals — many of them interchangeable, which is the series’ mordant point — “Youth (Homecoming)” follows two people in particular: Shi Wei and Fang Lingping, both of whom are headed home to marry their respective partners during their time off. Furthermore, any secondary characters who are introduced are framed, via on-screen text, as extensions of the two of them: “Shi Wei’s mother,” “Fang Lingping’s brother,” and so on.

This packaging goes a long way towards flattening people’s individual lives and personalities. Wang’s roving camera takes on the role of the factories themselves, keeping an eye on the subjects in claustrophobic spaces even once they leave the production floor. Their long train rides home are uncomfortably crowded, and some of the walls and living spaces in their villages bear the same sterile glow of white fluorescents as their crumbling city bunks. When the workers finally return to Zhili — a transition presented so matter-of-factly that it’s hardly a transition at all — it feels as though they never left.

If the film’s secondary subjects are mere extensions of Wei and Lingping, both of whom are forever trapped by their roles as migrant laborers, then the oppressive web simply never ends. Lingping’s husband, for instance, has a background in I.T., but he’s forced to help her at the factory too, which strains their relationship in turn. Further interviews with family members back home, both old and young, flesh out the lives and struggles of China’s rural poor; while there’s plenty of joy and celebration to be found, the looming hand of enterprise is never far behind.

“Youth (Homecoming)” is, at times, an utterly depressing film about how those aforementioned rumbles and hums become omnipresent, a despondent status quo that Wei has come to accept as soon as the film begins. “While there’s work, there’s life!” he exclaims, between phone calls to his bosses as he tries to track down his missing paycheck.

“Youth (Homecoming)” stands on its own, as a genuinely sorrowful film about how deeply the churn of industry has worked its way into people’s bones, as though they’ve become one with the machines they operate. However, this also makes the movie a coda to the series as a whole. Not only are its bitter ironies built on the backs of the previous entries, but it perfectly follows their established trajectory. “Youth (Spring)” verged on defiant in its depiction of life and laughter. “Youth (Hard Times)” portrayed a struggle to maintain these tenets, in the face of workers being robbed of their humanity. And Wang’s final entry, for better or worse, captures workers as they attempt to escape the grasp of capitalist drudgery, which has so molded and contorted them, that it may as well be a part of their very beings. They have become the work — and returning to their cramped Zhili dormitories has become their homecoming.

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