April 2022:
A SIGN (LANGUAGE) OF THE TIMES…
CODA is the 2021 coming-of-age comedy-drama written and directed by Sian Heder. Heder was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on June 23, 1977. She is the daughter of Welsh artist Mags Harries and Hungarian artist Lajos Héder and has a sister, Thrya, who is also an artist. She graduated from the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama with a BFA. Heder moved to Los Angeles after graduation and has gone on to win the Peabody Award for her writing in Television but returned to her roots with the film CODA. The film is an English-language remake of the 2014 French-Belgian film La Famille Bélier, it stars Emilia Jones as the Child of Deaf Adults, or CODA and the only hearing member of a deaf family. The family is from Gloucester, Massachusetts which is about an hour from Cambridge where Heder was born and grew up. Gloucester, MA is considered the hub of the fishing community and is also a popular summer tourist destination. Heder chooses it as the family’s hometown when she wrote the adapted screenplay because she often visited in summers and has her own memories of time in the fishing town. The film is centered around how Emilia Jones’s hearing character’s attempts to help her deaf family with their fishing business, while pursuing her own dreams of becoming a singer.
MEET THE ROSSI FAMILY OF GOUCHESTER, MA…
Gloucester High School student Ruby Rossi is the only hearing member of her family. Ruby’s parents, Frank and Jackie, as well as her older brother, Leo are all deaf. She has assisted with the family fishing business and had plans to work for the family full time after high school. Ruby has always been cast out among her peers at school for having a deaf family even though she can hear. People often handicap her with her family’s disability. But she has one close friend named Gertie who has always seen past Ruby being a CODA.
‘MILES’ TO GO BEFORE SHE SINGS….
While Gertie and Ruby are signing up for classes for their Senior Year, Ruby overhears her crush, Miles, signing up for choir and Ruby impulsively decides to do the same. It is on the first day of choir that Ruby meets her future mentor and teacher, Bernardo “Mr. V” Villalobos, while the students are instructed to sing “Happy Birthday to You” as a vocal exercise to place their parts vocally within the choir. Ruby had only ever sung around her family, her deaf family, so when asked to sing in front of the all hearing class, Ruby panics and runs out of the class. When she returns to apologize to Mr. V, she explains that she was bullied as a child for talking differently. When he explains there are all kinds of voices that make up a choir and he finally gets her to sing for him, he is surprised and at the same time impressed by her beautiful singing voice.
This eventually leads to him believing Ruby is good enough to get into Berklee College of Music, Mr. V’s alma mater. He explains that he will prepare her for the audition if it is something she wants to do. It instructs her that if she chooses to do this, she must commit to his schedule and do as he tell her. Ruby is hesitant, she has never done anything without her family, and with their fishing business struggling, she doesn’t think she can afford college, even if he helped her get accepted.
Ruby is convinced it’s worth trying when Mr. V explains they offer scholarships, she tells him she will work with him. At the same time Ruby makes her decision, her family is making a large decision business wise to better themselves, but it is all contingent on Ruby being the hearing individual in the family. Frank and Leo decide to embark on a new journey that Leo is confident he can get off the ground without Ruby’s help, but Frank insists it needs Ruby to spread the word.
The basis of the movie becomes Ruby’s struggle to find herself and identify herself individually apart from her family, among all these things occurring in her life, and how they ultimately become the entire struggle of everyone in the family in some way when Ruby explains to them that she wants to go to music school and can’t stay with them for the rest of her life. The movie to me, becomes about Ruby finding her balance between herself and her responsibility within her family.
CAUGHT BETWEEN TWO WORLDS…
It becomes about how her responsibility is her disability and her journey to discover herself through self-expression will also help her family rediscover their own individuality. Being a CODA, doesn’t define who she is as an individual. It’s just a small part of the bigger canvas to who Ruby is. The Child Of Deaf Adults who can hear and sing, and wants to go to music school. By the movies end you’re crying at the beautiful way Sian Heder shows how one thing accentuates the other to co-exist. The movie connects music of the hearing world so elegantly to the deaf world. I was completely moved by the last scene.
WHAT IT ALL MEANS…
The term “Coda” was coined by Millie Brother who also founded the non-profit organization CODA International, the purpose of the organization is to work as a resource and center of community for children of deaf adults that consists of both oral and sign language as well as being bicultural, and identifying with both deaf and hearing cultures. Codas often live in a purgatory of both worlds, due to navigating the on the border between the deaf and hearing worlds, due to serving as the hearing liaison to their deaf parents and/or siblings in the world their parents live in, and the hearing world they live in. There is a significant and widespread community of codas all over the globe. Ninety percent of children born to deaf adults can hear normally. If you are a coda under the age of 18, you are referred to in the deaf and hearing community by the acronym, koda.
TO BE REPRESENTED IS TO BE HEARD…
Ruby Rossi is a common character in real life but not in “reel life”. There is a small amount of work in film that features the deaf and hard of hearing, but up against the long history of the industry. It is very little film work. The world of the deaf do not receive enough accurate attention in films, and it can often be misused as a plot point in genres, for instance, a romantic comedy or drama. The stories in film hardly depict a focus on what it is to be deaf and what it is like to live in the world as deaf. It is instead often used to move storylines along and build a foundation of character development when trying to understand a hearing character.
This can be a downfall to the deaf community because films shape and often, like a mirror, reflect the cultural attitudes of society and can serve as a platform in influencing societies attitudes and the assumptions made by the hearing community who have had little to no contact with a deaf individual. If you were to go through the film archives of those that portray deaf characters in some way, this is obvious. Being deaf is often used as a plot device, a metaphor to a main character, a symbolic gesture towards society, or even the result of trauma and not something a character is born with, deaf characters are most often an informant to or a protagonist in a film. American film has never let being deaf carry an entire story. America has never really told the story of what it’s like to be deaf and what exactly the world looks like for someone in that community.
CODA’S ‘BROOM’ SEASON…
Then came CODA. It received its world premiere on January 28, 2021, at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, where Apple Studios acquired its distribution rights for a festival set record of $25 million. The film was released through Apple TV+ in theaters and for streaming service on August 13, 2021. Critics loved it and the American Film Institute named it one of the Top 10 movies of 2021 and went on to be AFI’s 2022 Movie of the Year. CODA went on to receive and win numerous accolades in awards season. At the 94th Academy Awards, the film won its three nominations. It won “Best Picture“, “Best Supporting Actor” (Troy Kotsur) and “Best Adapted Screenplay” (Sian Heder). It also made history in the academy as the First Film Distributed by a Streaming Service to Win Best Picture. The film won the Producers Guild of America Award for “Best Theatrical Motion Picture“, as well as the Writers Guild of America Award for “Best Adapted Screenplay” and the Screen Actors Guild Award for “Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture“.
‘FISHING’ FOR A CAST…
Along with Emilia Jones, who played Ruby Rossi. The cast included Academy Award Winner Marlee Matlin, who plays Ruby’s mother, Jackie Rossi. Matlin became the First Deaf Performer to Win an Academy Award when she won “Best Actress” for Children of a Lesser God in 1986. Troy Kotsur, her co-star joined her this year in Oscar History by being the First Deaf Man to Win the Academy Award for Acting when he won for Supporting Actor in CODA for his role as Ruby’s father Frank Rossi. It was a first time we saw living as deaf as the story. And to properly tell that story Matlin, who was cast early on in the development, was adamant during casting development that the actors being hired to play the family of Ruby, really be deaf.
The film financiers had fought Matlin on this, they were comfortable with her being cast due to her status as deaf in the film community and no doubt her Oscar for playing a deaf character. But she didn’t think it was enough nor a fair representation of the deaf community in film to hire hearing actors to play deaf alongside her. There were plenty of working deaf actors to play the parts. She threatened to quit the movie unless her husband and son were also played by Deaf actors. The financiers ultimately agreed to Matlin’s demands in order to keep her in the role.
Matlin discussed it in this interview from the Red Carpet at the Oscars when asked about inclusion of the deaf community in film:
It was the smart choice to listen to Matlin. The film has done so well because of its inclusivity of the deaf community and its first-time honest representation in film. Troy Kotsur and Daniel Durant, who plays Ruby’s older brother Leo Rossi, were handpicked by Sian Heder. She had seen Kotsur in a Deaf West production and found Durant through Auditions. The three deaf actors already knew each other prior to shooting CODA through their collaboration on a Deaf West production of Spring Awakening.
WHY REPRESENTATION MATTERS…
The film has excelled, because much to Hollywood’s Box Office chagrin, Deaf stories are real stories. It doesn’t matter that those stories become harder to tell to the hearing world production wise. Deaf People are a community of people and they are underrepresented in film. I assume it is from a profit point of view and production cost for studios. Otherwise, it makes no sense it would be harder to tell deaf stories. Movies are a visual medium. Deaf people are not blind and have waited for decades to see films fully embrace the stories that this community of people long to tell.
It won most awards and was so well received by viewers, not just because it was such a great story and had you looking for the box of tissues by movies end. You could take out the disability and make every character in the Rossi Family a hearing character, and anyone can relate to a family struggling to help their business survive while the parents cope with their daughter graduating High School and soon leaving to pursue her own future. The story connected with so many families, it didn’t matter that the characters were deaf.
The movie was better than it would have been telling the story from a hearing family’s point of view. It resonated with film viewers as a story that needed to be told and viewers across streaming services and voting guilds agreed. The response to CODA proved that we want more stories of real people doing real things. We love our Superhero movies as the Box Office has shown. But America has been waiting for a movie they can relate to. One that resonates with who they are not who they would be if Superheroes were real. Hollywood told a simple genuine story about a family that was very much a sign of the times. Families are just trying to make it while life goes on around them. The Rossi Family is all of us. This family just happened to be deaf.
