There is something almost suspiciously wholesome about CODA, the 2021 film that became the first streaming movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. It is funny, warm, sentimental, and determined to make its audience cry. Yet beneath its carefully arranged emotional buttons is a genuinely touching story about family, independence, and the difficult realization that loving the people closest to you does not mean giving up your own dreams.
Buy CODAThe title is an acronym for “child of deaf adults,” and that describes 17-year-old Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones), the only hearing member of her family. Ruby lives with her parents, Frank (Troy Kotsur), and Jackie (Marlee Matlin), and her older brother Leo (Daniel Durant) in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where the family makes its living as commercial fishermen. Ruby serves as a bridge between her family and the hearing world, particularly when they need someone to communicate with customers or conduct business.
Ruby’s life changes when she joins her high-school choir. Encouraged by her demanding but perceptive teacher, Bernardo Villalobos (Eugenio Derbez), she discovers that she has a real talent for singing. She also develops a crush on a fellow student, Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), and begins considering an audition for the prestigious Berklee College of Music. The problem is that pursuing music would mean leaving home, and her family has come to depend on her in ways that go far beyond the ordinary responsibilities of a teenager.
Director Sian Heder handles this conflict with a light touch. CODA is essentially a coming-of-age story, but Ruby’s situation gives the familiar material an unusual emotional complication. She isn’t merely trying to convince her parents to let her go off to college. She worries that leaving will make life harder for them, while her parents, for understandable reasons, have difficulty imagining the family without her.
The film’s most affecting moments come when CODA finds ways to put us inside the family’s different experiences. In one particularly memorable sequence, the soundtrack temporarily disappears while Ruby sings onstage, allowing us to experience the performance from her parents’ perspective. It is a simple device, but an effective one. Rather than treating deafness as something tragic that must be overcome, the film asks us to consider how differently members of the same family can experience the same moment.
The performances are uniformly appealing. Jones gives Ruby enough awkwardness and uncertainty to make her feel like an actual teenager rather than a precocious movie heroine. Kotsur is especially good as Frank, whose crude jokes and larger-than-life personality conceal a deep affection for his family. His performance won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, making him the first deaf male actor to win an Oscar. Matlin brings a similar mixture of toughness, humor, and vulnerability to Jackie.
If CODA has a weakness, it is that very little about its trajectory is difficult to predict. The movie follows the familiar architecture of the inspirational family drama, and some moments push toward the edge of sentimentality. But predictability is not necessarily a fatal flaw when the journey is this engaging.
What makes the film work is that Ruby’s dream and her family’s needs are not presented as competing moral positions. There is no villain standing between her and her future. Everyone is simply trying to figure out how a loving family can change radically enough to become something new without falling apart.
