CODA (Sian Heder, 2021) Emilia Jones, Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur
Oscars 2022 WON Best Film, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (Troy Kotsur)
Apple paid $25m just for the rights to distribute this film, which gives you a good idea of how sure they were that it would be popular. They were right. It has all kinds of popular appeal – mainly the CODA - child of deaf adults - played by the one member of the principal cast who is not deaf, Emilia Jones, who had to spend months learning the three things her character had to do: sign, sing, and fish.
I was keen to watch it for Marlee Matlin's performance, having seen a lot of her in the West Wing, for example, but also in her Oscar-winning role in Children of a Lesser God (Randa Haines, 1986). However, her husband in the film, Troy Kotsur, gets all the funny lines in a scene near the opening almost made to be used in the trailer.
Jessica Kiang:
CODA is not much about real life. Despite some nicely observed lived-in details, this is smoothed out, wishful thinking, setting a ‘get your heart right and nothing can stop you’ moral loose among people of such unfailingly good will that the outcome is never in doubt. One montage plays out to Ruby’s cover of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’, and it’s a musical choice that feels like the film in miniature. Scrubbed of the smoke and regret that make the original such an anthem of hard-won life experience, only the brightest, most hopeful notes remain, ringing pure and sweet and appealing, if not exactly true. sightandsound.
Garry Gillard | reviews | New: 1 February, 2022 | Now: 2 April, 2022