[5.0/10] Every now and then I think about *The Artist*, the near-silent film from 2011. It was a perfectly charming, creative, and entertaining film. But it made one terrible, awful mistake -- winning the Academy Award for Best Picture. Suddenly, it was no longer judged on its own merits, but measured against the likes of *The Godfather* and *Casablanca* and thought of for what it wasn’t rather than what it was.
*CODA* is not especially charming, or creative, or entertaining. It is a bland piece of feel-good pablum wrapped in a bundle of cliches and contrivances. But I also cannot help but wonder if I would judge it more gently if I’d say, caught it on Lifetime or the Disney Channel, where it belongs, rather than as part of a pre-Oscars watch list. Being nominated for film’s greatest prize brings with it certain standards and expectations, despite a certain amount of crud that regularly makes the cut, and this film is not up to them.
But that’s not a sin. There’s room in the cinematic diet for unchallenging, crowd-pleasing fluff meant to tug on the heartstrings at predictable intervals. We all need that sometimes. Candidly, *CODA* plays more like a movie meant for fourteen-year-olds to watch on rainy afternoons, but by gum, those movies fill a need too, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
What is a sin is taking the opportunity to put the deaf community and its unique experiences on screen in front of major audiences, and wasting it on such a paint-by-numbers film. The best thing *CODA* has going for it is the thing cinema does so well -- providing viewers the chance to see, empathize with, and better understand people whose stories and experiences are likely different from their own. The only crime here is squandering the chance to deliver something real through that lens and instead falling back on bog standard cliches and hoary old story beats.
The film tells the story of Ruby, a seventeen-year-old girl with hearing who’s part of a family of deaf people. Her father, Frank, is an eccentric but encouraging fisherman. Her mother, Jackie, doesn’t quite get her daughter or her interests, but cares, despite her willingness to make demands of her. Her brother, Leo, resents his sister a bit for how much his parents rely on her and aches to be able to prove himself on his own. Ruby herself is torn between continuing to help the family she loves but feels left out of and occasionally smothered by on the one hand, and pursuing music school which would require leaving this part of her life behind.
In telling this family’s story, *CODA* deploys a formula for its challenges and conflicts that could fit a myriad of other topics and communities. The parents who just don’t understand, the conflict tug-of-war between helping the family business and one child’s passion, the encouraging but demanding teacher, the stock teenage romance, the frustrated sibling, the parental turn from “over my dead body” to “We’ll drive you to the big audition/swim meet/rodeo show/robotics competition” -- it’s a bevy of tired tropes delivered competently but without any imagination.
What’s frustrating is that every once in a while, the specter of a better, deeper movie peeks through. In the film’s best scene, Jackie explains to her daughter why she prayed Ruby would be deaf, revealing insecurities about being able to connect that reflect her struggles with her own mother. In another, Frank asks his daughter to sing her solo just for him, so he can read her lips, feel the sound coming from her through, and connect with something important to her. During her big recital, the sound drops out, and the film puts viewers with hearing in the perspective of Ruby’s parents, comprehending their daughter’s big moment through other cues, taking in the reactions second hand and appreciating them in different ways.
There’s an honesty to these scenes, a rawness and beauty, that’s otherwise entirely absent from a film that relies on the shallowest of cinematic conventions at every turn. The few occasions when *CODA* injects this type of truth into this art only makes it all the more frustrating when it doesn’t do so for the other ninety-five percent of its runtime.
What’s especially frustrating is the way the screenplay relies on the cheapest of contrivances. Ruby is late for her private lessons with her music teacher, Mr. Villalobos, due to having to support her family’s risky new business. The chronic lateness prompts him to dismiss her for not valuing his time. But do he and Ruby ever have a conversation about the demands on her time, or the fact that the last straw happened because her mom refused to let her go due to an obligation Jackie never told her daughter about? Of course not. Instead, Mr. Villalobos simply accuses Ruby of not wanting it enough and no one asks or offers *why* any of this is happening.
It’s not enough that Ruby feels uncomfortable about bringing her hearing boyfriend around her family. Instead, the boyfriend has to relay a silly but embarrassing interaction with her dad to his friend, who tells the whole school and provide Ruby with a grudge she can get over when it’s narratively convenient. It’s not enough that Ruby feels pulled in two directions by her family life and her personal life. Instead, the one day she blows off work to go be with her beau just so happens to be the day when a government inspector unexpectedly shows up on the family fishing boat and calls the coast guard on them because of their condition, forcing them to deal with fines and suspensions. None of the major plot obstacles here are earned, they just happen because the narrative needs them to.
That lack of earning it affects the whole film. In the closing montage, Jackie is welcomed by the other fishermen’s wives she once called “hearing bitches” without any indication as to how. The family ultimately supports Ruby going away to school, but it’s never explained how they’re going to make it work when they need a hearing deckhand and purportedly can’t afford it. Despite the cash-strapped family, we never see that Ruby gets a scholarship, she just drives off into the sunset. Problems go away through magic in this movie.
Hell, it even weakens the climax of the movie. In her big music school audition, Ruby sings with the same hesitant voice Mr. Villalobos, a cartoon character cliche, has been encouraging her to eschew in favor of a more confident, personal one, with a dash of *Dead Poet Society*. She finds that voice when she sees her family having snuck into watching the audition, and signs her way through her big song, with Mr. V on the piano to boot.
Under other circumstances, I’d applaud it as a sign of how her hesitance comes from not being able to resolve her roles as the hearing daughter of deaf parents with unique demands and as her own person with goals and wants apart from her family. The confidence comes from knowing she’s supported, from finding that resolution between each of these facets of her life that remain a part of her as a greater whole, enriched by both.
But there’s very little set up for the signing as a way for her to break through to the more confident and self-assured version of herself, or that seeing the sign of her family’s support would encourage her rather than make her more nervous. I’d like to applaud it as a nicely underplayed bit of subtlety, in a movie where almost every bit of dialogue is thuddingly on the nose. Yet, given all the underwritten shortcuts the movie takes elsewhere, it’s hard not to view these developments in the same light.
*CODA* isn’t the first movie to take easy narrative shortcuts in the name of delivering a saccharine ending. It’s not the first movie to feature blunt dialogue and contrived plot obstacles for its protagonist. What’s striking about a film competing for such accolades is how familiar and unadventurous it is in its construction despite the uniqueness of the experience it’s depicting. There’s a stock quality to how the movie unfolds that’s borderline embarrassing given the opportunity to delve deeper and more frankly into the deaf experience.
But maybe that's unfair. If this were merely a Hallmark channel movie punching above its weight, we (read: I) might look on it more fondly. Instead, it’s an Oscar contender that I judge according to the standards of prestige pictures, despite the Academy being the “august body” that crowns borderline offensive sap like *Green Book* on a semi-regular basis. Context changes how we see things, and being an awards contender could hardly put this movie in a worse light.
All that said, *CODA* isn’t for me, and shouldn’t be seriously considered for the big prize. But it is for somebody, and there’s a place in the cinematic pantheon for trite but uplifting films that put stories of distinct communities in a pleasing, accessible package for broad audiences. There’s reason to demand more from what Hollywood declares, by acclamation, the best movie of the year, but also reason to appreciate films for what they are, apart from the circus and expectation game the awards circuit inevitably saddles pleasant enough but less-than-transcendent films with.
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