CODA Review: A Look at Deaf Family Life That Often Edges Over into the Saccharine

Writer-director Sian Heder’s CODA, like Sound of Metal, stuffs an examination of deaf culture into a crowd-pleasingly inspirational formula. But while Darius Marder’s film laces its clichés with a visceral approximation of a singer’s loss of hearing, CODA succumbs to banal coming-of-age sermonizing, shortchanging the power of a handful of well-textured moments. Cut 25 minutes from CODA and it could almost be any other film about teenagers looking to distinguish themselves from their parents, with caricatures of well-meaning adults and friends. In a way, this generic quality is poignant, implying indisputably that the deaf should be allowed to enjoy soothing pabulum of their own, but Heder allows a better film to elude her in the process of checking off all sorts of feel-good indie boxes.

Ruby (Emilia Jones) is a CODA, or a child of deaf adults, who helps her parents, Frank (Troy Kotsur) and Jackie (Marlee Matlin), with their fishing business in working-class Gloucester, a beautiful Massachusetts coastal town. The sole member of her family who can hear, the teenaged Ruby has served as an all-purpose translator and employee for many years, getting up before dawn to help Frank and her older brother, Leo (Daniel Durant), catch fish, and then negotiate with the dealers at fish markets who are ripping everyone off.

CODA is most appealing during these scenes, capturing the drudgery of the everyday and the nourishing bonding ritual among this family. Unfortunately, Heder doesn’t entirely trust this milieu to carry her film, introducing a high-concept indie gimmick. In a remarkably on-the-nose effort to distinguish herself from her family, Ruby secretly wants to be a singer—a plot device so cutely ironic that even a character is compelled to remark of its contrivance: Over breakfast, Jackie amusingly claims that if she were blind Ruby would want to be a painter.

Watching CODA, it’s easy to share Jackie’s skepticism. Singing has often been an easy metaphor in coming-of-age narratives for wanting to “live out loud,” and it’s a particularly blunt and rickety concept when offered up in the context of a deaf family. Ruby’s desire to sing is also dropped out of nowhere late in the film’s first act, as she appears to have decided to join the school choir at random. Not long afterward, Ruby is singing beautifully and being encouraged by her choir instructor (Eugenio Derbez) to apply for a scholarship at Berklee.

Determined to ensure that we feel consistently wonderful while watching CODA, Heder elides virtually any indications of hardship: Ruby doesn’t have to work for her voice, which instantly sounds trained, and her lack of money or connections to Berklee is brushed away with a few lines of dialogue. The only concern here is whether or not she can part from her family, which leads to speechifying and bathos that are common of angsty teen dramas.

When Heder isn’t tending to the dictates of formula and sets out to explore the contours of what it means to be part of a deaf family, CODA can be quite moving. The first of Rose’s two climactic sing-offs is partially rendered silent, communicating Frank and Jackie’s love and appreciation of their daughter, as well as their insurmountable distance from a crucial element of her life. After this recital, Frank and Ruby share a father-daughter moment outside their home after he asks her to sing just for him. And after she obliges him, Frank looks at Ruby awestruck, reading her lips and gently touching her throat so as to sense the sounds, and we come to truly feel how he’s hearing her. It’s a transcendent moment that feels wrested from actual experience, easily eclipsing the cute yet disposable interludes that glut the majority of CODA. Too often, the film’s sweetness edges over into the saccharine.