There’s a long, list history of films debuting at the Sundance Film Festival, absolutely killing with the critical and festival audience, winning awards, selling for record sums, and then sinking like a stone once they reach actual audiences.
CODA, a dramatic film directed by Sian Heder, was the most acclaimed film at the virtual edition of Sundance back in January. It won a shelf-full of awards at the festival, including the U.S. Grand Jury Prize, the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award, the Special Jury Ensemble Cast Award, as well as Best Director in the U.S. Dramatic section. Then, CODA sold to Apple, for a reported record sum of $25 million.
This week, CODA arrives, both in theaters and on the Apple TV+ streaming service. Will it break the curse? It may, for two big reasons: The “Sundance Effect” is less of a factor when the critics and audience are watching in their living rooms rather than in the thin air of the Utah mountains. Also, it’s really, really great.
CODA gets that title from the acronym “child of deaf adults,” and also is a reference to the musical term. The film is a remake of a French film from 2014 called La Famille Bélier, and Emilia Jones stars as Ruby, a teenager who is the CODA of the title. She is the only non-deaf member of a family that also includes her parents (Troy Kotsur and Marlee Matlin) and her brother (Daniel Durant.)
The family lives in the fishing town of Gloucester, Mass. — also the setting for the George Clooney/Mark Wahlberg adventure movie The Perfect Storm — and operates a fishing boat. Ruby, though, has aspirations for a career as a singer, which leads to friction with her parents, who of course are deaf and can’t experience music first-hand. She also has a romance with a classmate (played by Sing Street star Ferdia Walsh-Peelo.)
Yes, a lot of it is very corny. But it works- and in the age of Ted Lasso, I feel like it’s going to truly hit the Apple TV+ audience specifically.
CODA utilizes a formula that’s been part of movies going as far back as The Jazz Singer, almost a century ago, in which the parents want one thing for their child, who wants another altogether. But CODA gives it a twist, telling the unique story of the deaf parents of a hearing child, and that particular conflict. That comes to a head in two or three different movie moments that are absolutely magical.
Jones, a mostly obscure English actress who starred in Netflix’s Locke & Key, proves a fine actress and an even better singer. But the true highlight of the film is Troy Kotsur, as the dad, who gets to both say some very dirty things in sign language, and act out some heart-wrenching dramatic scenes.
CODA has made history as the first film ever to have “burned-in” captions. Marlee Matlin has been playing groundbreaking deaf roles for 30 years, and she and Durant are both veterans of the cable series Switched at Birth, which featured lots of deaf characters and frequently explored deaf issues.
However, it would be a mistake to view this film as merely an exercise in “wokeness” or identity politics, or as the kind of thing that’s asking for laurels for featuring a marginalized group. The characters are great and multifaceted, and the dad, in particular, is one of the year’s funnier movie characters, a deaf, blue-collar middle-aged man who’s unapologetically horny and off-color.
Sure, the movie makes it look a lot easier to get into a top music conservatory in Boston than it probably actually is. And the character of the music teacher (Eugenio Derbez) is somewhat one-note, and seems to be in a different movie than all of the other characters, although the scene where he teaches the students a choral version of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” is inspired.
Yes, $25 million is a lot of money for a company to pay for a movie. But Apple’s market cap is currently about $2.4 trillion, and its annual content budget is said to be in the billions. Apple has almost certainly paid more, all-in, for individual seasons of several of its shows than it did to acquire CODA.
Powered by a compelling story and great moments, CODA really deserves to be discovered by audiences.
