Butler's Cinema Scene

“CODA” My rating: B (Apple+)

111 minutes | MPAA: PG-13

The cynic in me approached “CODA” with some trepidation. The trailer makes it look like an inspirational tale with a capital “I.”

Well, it is, but the marvel of Sian Heder’s first feature lies in the way it roots its story in a gritty reality…albeit a reality relatively few of us have been exposed to.

Ruby (Emilia Jones) is a high school senior living in a New England fishing village. On the surface, anyway, it’s picturesque as all get-out. Look closer and you see a town and a way of life in economic decline.

Ruby has grown up working her family’s fishing boat. We soon learn that she is essential to the clan’s financial stability. Ruby, you see, is a CODA (child of deaf adults).

Her mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin), father Frank (Troy Kotsur) and big brother Leo (Daniel Durant) rely on Ruby’s signing skills to run interference with the hearing world, whether it’s answering the marine radio or negotiating a sale price for their daily haul.

Heder’s screenplay (an adaptation of a 2014 French/Belgian production) centers on a conflict with existential implications. Ruby loves to sing. It’s about the only thing she’s good at.

And of course it is an avocation that cannot be shared by her hearing impaired family. In fact, they tend to be dismissive of Ruby’s artistic desires. Her mom pointedly asks if they were blind, would Ruby become a painter?

Things get dicier when the high school music teacher (Eugenio Derbez) sees potential in Ruby’s voice. He gives her a prominent role in an upcoming show; moreover, he begins pulling strings to have her considered for a scholarship by his old alma mater, the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

This opens up several wormy cans.

Can Ruby in good conscience abandon her family to pursue a personal dream? There’s Frank and Leo’s effort to create a fishermen’s co-op in a last-ditch effort to save the local fishing industry. There’s Mama Jackie’s stubborn view that deaf culture is vastly superior to the hearing world and that by pursing singing Ruby is betraying her roots.

And, yeah, there’s a guy…Ferdia Walsh-Peelo plays Ruby’s classroom singing partner and slowly percolating love interest.

The possibilities for saccharine uplift are legion — yet Heder and her cast sidestep all the pitfalls by giving us characters that are fully formed and absolutely believable. Ruby’s family is a brawling, beer-chugging, pot-sniffing bunch, incredibly funny even as they are infuriatingly exasperating.

And the casting of deaf performers in key roles is a huge plus. It now seems like a no brainer, but for most of Hollywood history hearing actors would have been used.

Jones, a Brit, effortlessly slides into Ruby’s sometimes chaffed skin; she’s a natural who never seems to be trying too hard. And she’s got a terrific singing voice (or seems to…nothing is ever quite what it seems in the movies).

| Robert W. Butler