Her parents, reading the micro-gestures and choked-back sobs of the other audience members, finally realise how gifted their daughter is. Coda allows its hearing audience only one moment of concession, as the sound cuts out midway through one of Ruby’s performances. And Heder’s unfussy approach to the film allows her cast to craft a family dynamic that feels firmly grounded in experience, as they tease and argue, each gesture insulated by love. There’s nothing cutesy about the difficult choices these characters are forced to make between what they want and who they’ve dedicated themselves to.
Meanwhile, her father’s work in the fishing industry has come under threat of corporate interference, with 60 per cent of his catch now handed over to middlemen. Ruby wants to be a musician but, as the hearing child of deaf parents, positioned as their de facto interpreter, she worries that striking out on her own would sever one of their few concrete connections to hearing culture.
#CODA MOVIE REVIEW PLUS#
The family at its centre – Frank (Troy Kotsur) and Jackie (Marlee Matlin) plus their kids Leo (Daniel Durant) and Ruby (Emilia Jones) – remain a stubborn, bubbling mess of conflicted desires and personal duties. There’s nothing slight or simplistic about Coda. It’s been frequently dismissed by commentators as a shallow crowd-pleaser, but the label only fits if you’re faithfully tied to the assumption that any expression of sentimentality should be equated automatically with naivete. And it matters that Coda won because of the doors it will open for other majority deaf casts. It mattered that Chloé Zhao won for Nomadland, because it offered genuine hope that the barriers for women directors, and especially women of colour, were starting to break. It mattered when Parasite won, because it helped shake a little of the fear of subtitled films out of English-speaking audiences.
#CODA MOVIE REVIEW FULL#
Oscar nominations 2022: The full list of nominees.West Side Story: Why Steven Spielberg’s ill-fated musical should win the Oscar for Best Picture.Best-dressed Oscar couples of all time, from Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt to Beyonce and Jay-Z.The film received rapturous reviews and a healthy dollop of publicity, and walked away from Sundance with a record-breaking $25m acquisition deal with Apple TV+. Coda, an honest and sincere drama about a hearing child in a deaf family, was something of an underdog when it first premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2021. Some saw this coming: the film had landed several crucial wins during the run-up to Oscars, including the Producers Guild and Screen Actors Guild. Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast was the most obvious Oscar bait of the pack, but while Jane Campion’s meticulously directed western, The Power of the Dog, was an early frontrunner, it was Siân Heder’s Coda that ultimately walked away with Best Picture. The A-list-packed satire Don’t Look Up, and the lushly traditional musical West Side Story, fell by the wayside early on in the race. And awards season this year hasn’t exactly handed them a tidy narrative to work from – the biopics, like The Eyes of Tammy Faye and Spencer, are a little too self-aware to play as strictly conventional.
People love to argue about the Oscars, even when they’re not sure exactly what they’re arguing about.
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