For the past four years I have thought that this movie was named Coda.  I had seen it referred to as CODA in print, but there is a basketball team called the Miami Heat that has the annoying tic of referring to itself as the “Miami HEAT” in its own press releases, so I thought this was the same deal.  In the movie, the protagonist has to learn to read music, and her teacher gives her a glossary that we see includes the symbol for a musical coda.  That seemed like a small detail to name the whole movie after, so I kept waiting for the meaning to make itself clear: like, does the teacher secretly have terminal cancer, so helping this student get into music school is the coda of his life, or something?  It turns out that “CODA” stands for “child of deaf adults”.  I learned this from reading reviews after finishing the movie.  The movie itself never explains it.

But anyway, that’s the premise: we head to Gloucester, Massa­chusetts, and meet Ruby, a high school senior whose mother, fa­ther, and older brother are all deaf, but not only can Ruby hear⁠—which has meant that she has had to act as an interpreter for the rest of the family she was a small child⁠—but singing is her pas­sion, and when she signs up for the school choir, her teacher soon tells her that with a lot of intensive practice she could get a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music in Boston.  So not only do her parents not want her to leave in any case, dependent on her as they are⁠—when she takes a single day off from helping out on the family fishing boat, her father’s license is suspended, because no one hears the Coast Guard calling on the radio⁠—but she’s talking about leaving to pursue a life in music, which they don’t even understand and which feels like a slap in the face.  I’d seen roughly the same premise before, in a German movie called Beyond Silence back in the ’90s; CODA turns out to have been an American adaptation of another movie with the same premise, this one from France, called La famille Bélier.  I guess the meme version is this:

Country: has deaf people

That country’s filmmakers: What if a couple of them had a daughter with a talent for music??  O irony!

The reviews that I read after I watched this ranged from “This is a schmaltzy movie that might as well have played on the Hall­mark Channel” to “This is a schmaltzy movie that might as well have played on the Hallmark Channel, but I liked it! Giving it the Oscar for Best Picture is silly, but it’s sweet!”  I lean more toward the latter camp.  Yes, it’s formulaic.  Yes, it’s loaded with (evi­dently successful!) Oscar bait⁠—did anyone not think that Ruby’s big audition would have her signing along with her singing so that her family can follow the thematically appropriate lyrics?  And yes, worst of all, it deploys the “profane granny” for comic relief⁠—in this case, not a literal grandmother saying something crass (see, it’s funny because grandmothers are generally not thought of as crass, yet this one is!), but rather Ruby’s parents.  See, it’s funny because they’re disabled and so a movie like this is supposed to portray them as noble, but ha ha, they keep embar­rassing their daughter by being so foul-mouthed!  Er, foul-hand­ed!  But the thing is, as much as these bits grated on me, I did smile when Ruby translates for her father at a town meeting: “Suck my dick! …That’s from him, not me.”  And as much as I was not particularly enthralled by the romance subplot between Ruby and her duet partner at the school recital, I did laugh at this bit:

Basically, I recognize that this movie fits better among ABC Af­terschool Specials than among Skandies winners, which explains why it came in at #171 and why two-thirds of the voters didn’t even bother to see it.  But it had some good bits, and all in all I liked it more than I didn’t.  I mean, that’s probably not altogether surprising.  News flash!  Movie about semi-saintly teenage girl appeals to author of Photopia!

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