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“CODA” Is a Feel-Bad Feel-Good Movie The Best Picture nominee is a predictable tale of virtue rewarded.

By Richard Brody

February 23, 2022

It’s meant, all too conspicuously, as a feel-good movie. But “CODA,” an

Oscar nominee for Best Picture that’s playing for free in select theatres

this weekend (and is already streaming on Apple TV+), had the opposite

effect on me. The movie, written and directed by Sian Heder, is based on

the 2014 French film “The Bélier Family”; it’s the story of the Rossis, a

third-generation fishing family in Gloucester, Massachusetts. It focusses

on one of the Rossi children, Ruby (Emilia Jones), a seventeen-year-old

high-school senior whose parents, Jackie (Marlee Matlin) and Frank

(Troy Kotsur), are deaf, as is her older brother, Leo (Daniel Durant).

Ruby is a hearing person but fluent in American Sign Language, and her

life revolves around the family business. She goes out on the boat each

morning with Leo and their father, and, back on shore, negotiates the

sale of their catch to a wholesaler who, they’re convinced, takes

advantage of them as deaf people (and of Ruby as a child). The drama

involves Ruby’s efforts to develop a life of her own, to break away from

her family without breaking with it—even as she recognizes that her

independent activities and her extended absence may threaten her

family’s livelihood. It’s no spoiler, alas, to know that all comes out well

in the end for all concerned. The narrative cards all come up aces, as is

predictable from the moment that they’re dealt.

It’s an achievement of sorts—a display of craft that’s also a kind of

craftiness—to establish a level of predictability that both guarantees a

payoff and maintains a low simmer of suspense. The drama depends on

sustaining a viewer’s rooting interest while keeping it unthreatened with

the actual possibility of loss. It isn’t only the movie’s bright and perky

tone that thrusts its characters risk-free into a risky world but also the

contours of the drama itself, the kinds of events that are shown and the

kinds that aren’t, the character traits that are defined (with the cinematic

equivalent of Day-Glo highlighters) and the ones that are neglected.

When Ruby is first seen on the boat, she’s singing along with a record of

Etta James, and guess what: Ruby’s way out involves singing. In the hall

of her high school, beside her locker, she stares at a boy she thinks is

cute; in the next scene, students are signing up for extracurriculars, and

that boy, Miles Patterson (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), chooses choir, so Ruby

impulsively signs up for it, too. The music teacher, Bernardo Villalobos

(Eugenio Derbez), a.k.a. Mr. V., quickly discerns Ruby’s unformed talent

and picks her for the group’s featured duet—with Miles. The teacher

also encourages her to apply to his alma mater, the Berklee College of

Music, in Boston—but the private study that he’s offering to prepare her

for her audition conflicts with her family duties at the dock. Yet, guess

what: Leo, too, is impatient to exert some control over the family

business without depending on Ruby’s assistance.

The convenient lineup of plot details extends beyond the foregrounded

action into its psychological loam and its real-world implications. Can’t

afford college? There are scholarships. Ruby is bullied? Suck it up, use

it, and move on. The wholesaler is taking advantage of the Rossis? They

start their own co-op. The other fishermen either ignore or mock Frank

and Leo for their deafness? See what happens when the Rossis make

them some money. “CODA” is a tale of the boundless bounty of

personal initiative. The movie’s main villains are “the Feds,” federal

maritime inspectors who intrusively impose on the entire fleet of fishing

boats and bring charges against the Rossis for not having a hearing

person aboard ship. It’s a cinematic, libertarian fairy tale, a genre that’s

hardly unprecedented: Clint Eastwood doesn’t stint on his caricature of

bureaucratic order, and will even do so in defiance of the history that he

films, as in “Sully.” But “CODA” doesn’t hint at the tragic sense of

responsibility with which Eastwood matches his world view, or the

symbolic imagination with which he evokes it.

The tale of work rewarded is also one of virtue rewarded, and its

protagonists are defined by nothing but their virtues, of overtly

calculated and oddly old-fashioned sorts. Frank and Jackie have an

openly randy marriage (their loud afternoon sex turns into an absurd plot

point), and the family gleefully talks dirty in A.S.L.; whereas Ruby,

disdaining the sexual freedom of her best friend, Gertie (Amy Forsyth),

all but proclaims her chastity. The discussions never go beyond the

immediate practicalities of the family’s business (and, as for those

practicalities, there’s precious little of them). Ruby’s amiable blankness

is a template for grownup viewers to fill in with their own projections of

what constitutes a good kid. Besides their tight family bonds and their

narrowly defined social ones, the Rossis remain undefined. There’s no

politics, religion, or culture, and the action takes place in isolation from

ideas, points of view, reflections on life; its progress comes through the

realization of sentiment, and its resolution of conflict comes mainly

through the elision of any potential grounds for conflict.

On the other hand, the movie itself displays an authentic and significant

merit, which is to offer large and dramatically vigorous roles to three

deaf actors of extraordinary talent, and their performances give the

movie a semblance of vitality and of presence that leaps beyond the

confines of the script. What their performances reveal is the poverty of

the commercial cinema at large (and, truth be told, of independent

filmmaking, too) in the casting of deaf actors, of actors with disabilities.

Yet, in “CODA,” the burden of labor falls entirely on these actors to

suggest that their characters are anything but stick figures of goodness

and honor and have a three-dimensional inner life. (Kotsur’s nomination

for Best Supporting Actor is well deserved, for both the quality of his

performance and the quantity of character-building that it demands.)

Heder directs with a plain efficiency that lays the scripted events

end-to-end and leaves out any feeling that the characters may exist

between those scenes. The sense of cards, discrete and numbered, being

turned over gets in the way of a viewer’s free perception and

unencumbered thought. The movie is a litmus test of the willingness to

be pulled along, from start to finish, staring straight ahead while being

told that there’s nothing to see. The sense of calculation makes the

journey feel like a lockstep march; the movie’s sense of a story that’s

dictated rather than observed makes its good feelings feel bad.