Film Review
Ambiguity, Conflictivity & Earthly Bliss in CODA (2021)
Christoph Joppich
What at first seems like just another average high school rom-com quickly develops into a complete coming-of-age story that greatly enacts the ambivalence and conflicts of being “CODA”: child of deaf adults.
The basics of the story are quickly laid out. Rubi (Emilia Jones) is a senior in high school. Her family relationship, father Frank (Troy Kotsur), brother Leo (Daniel Durant), and mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin), is characterized by tenderness, trust, and lack of concern.
Just being a teenager?
Rubi is in love with her classmate Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), who doesn’t seem to pay attention to her. Her grades are below average, and her passion is rock music. She joins the school choir partly to get closer to Miles. Occasionally she suffers bullying, but her best friend Gertie (Amy Forsyth) stands by her. So far, so cliché. Fortunately, it doesn’t stop here: based on this starting position, a plot of hope, despair, empathy, and anger develops into what could be the actual creation of a perfect happy ending.
Multi-layered conflicts and character constellation
The twist, which does not yet elevate the story as such, but creates the catalyst for said elevation, is the family’s precariousness. Rubi is “coda,” the only hearing child in a deaf and mute family. Together with her father and brother, day in and day out before school, she maintains a fishing boat that barely yields enough for the family to survive. Rubi is both free labor and an interpreter for the intermediaries, who buy off their catch at (too) low rates. This specific constellation, being members of a typical U.S. lumpenproletariat, creates the ambiguity grounded in the film.
Rubi’s status as “coda” is her family’s access to the hearing and talking world. The flaws of her parents and her brother quickly become apparent: they are loving and caring people who, however, cope with their disability by blatantly shutting themselves off from the outside world, which they seem to despise.
Between two worlds
There is no question that all members of the family experience exclusion and discrimination, but at times it seems as if the family is just as hostile towards the “normal/abled” world as it is towards them. Rubi is torn apart by these contradictions. The outside world bullies her for her origins and her family for their disability. Yet, at the same time, her family stubbornly refuses to remove their self-created separation from the outside world.
Moreover, her passion, music, and later singing is not relatable to the welded family community, who have no use for music as they cannot understand it. This discrepancy is painfully crystallized when Jackie, after Rubi tells her that she sings in the choir, flippantly replies, “And if I were blind, would you love painting?”.
The lack of understanding
But even singing as a passion does not create a safe space: her coach, the charismatic Latino Bernardo Villalobos (Eugenio Derbez), thinks highly of Rubi’s talent but often meets her background with incomprehension. His will to support Rubi, and help her get a scholarship, finds its limits in his inability to empathize with Rubi’s conflicted state of being.
Another contradiction opens up as Rubi gets closer to Miles, whose class origins are opposed to hers; he comes from an upper-middle-class household with strict traditional parents who treat their child not with tenderness but severity, unlike Rubi’s parents. The feelings of the two are overlaid by their contrasting longings for recognition from their parents. Miles even romanticizes the poor living conditions of Rubi’s family over his material safety and breaks her trust by gossiping about her deaf parents having sex.
The contradictions sharpen (and lift into earthly bliss)
The culmination of the ambivalent conflicts and their resolution is a local authority revocation of Frank’s fishing license. When Rubi fails to go to work one morning for singing training, the absence of a translator is noticed by the water police. As a result, Rubi has to abandon her scholarship and Berklee College of Music dreams so that her father gets his license back (which is only possible with a translator on board). It seems as if there is no way to resolve the contradictions between Rubi, her family, and the outside world.
Here comes the turning point: the family arranges their needs and desires in various well-written and emotional dialogues, which happen in sign language. Rubi reconciles with her mother after Frank confronts her for her lack of understanding. Rubi and Leo fall out. The family pulls themselves together to watch – rather than listen to – Rubi’s choir perform at school, a scene somewhere between comic relief and embitterment. The final duet between Rubi and Miles, which the story has been actively working towards, is shown silently, forcefully conveying how hard it is for the family to get excited about singing.
Hope for Rubi’s future
After the concert, back at home, Rubi sings for her father. Crying, he touches her vocal cords, and it seems like the boundary between family and the outside world breaks for the first time. From now on, the conflicts unravel. The following day, the family drives together to Berklee to get Rubi to her hearing on time, which she had sworn off. Although bumpy, Rubi manages to put on a terrific performance, not least with the help of Bernardo, who shows up at the last minute to play the piano for her.
These developments mold into a happy ending. Rubi gets accepted at Berklee, unlike Miles. Loosely the two arrange to visit each other. The family finds a translator, who is instructed, initially still under Rubi’s supervision. Together with other fishermen, Frank and Leo form a cooperative to prevent exploitation by the intermediates of the surplus value they create.
Finally, after a heartbreaking farewell from her family, Gertie drives Rubi to Berklee, and the film ends – not in kitsch, but in pleasure, the pleasure that the gravity of the staged conflicts resolves into a veritable and comprehensible feeling that conveys bliss on earth.
To experience catharsis through film, CODA is the way to go
CODA has it all: wit, drama, lust, a plot that is located in private but is yet political, characters who are not black-and-white but colorful, despair, toil, but also affection and hope. Three Oscars are well deserved.