‘CODA’ Will Make You Want to Call Your Mom
There’s a moment in CODA when 17-year-old Ruby (Emilia Jones) tells her mom, Jackie (Oscar-winning actor Marlee Matlin), she has joined the choir. Rolling her eyes, Jackie shoots back in American Sign Language, “If I was blind, would you want to paint?”
Ruby, as you may suspect, is not deaf like her former pageant mom, rough-edged fisherman father, Frank (Troy Kotsur), and hot, business-minded brother, Leo (Daniel Durant). CODA, which stands for child of deaf adults, tells the story of a teenager balancing her passion for singing, high school drama, and first love with her duties as her family’s only interpreter for their fishing business in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
While the mother-daughter moment reads charged on paper—and immediately elicits a storm-off from Ruby—this is not the emotional, gut-punching moment it could have been (though plenty of those appear throughout the film). Instead, the words drip off Jackie’s hands casually, without thought, like every mom internalizing her daughter’s choices and assuming it’s all about them. As if to emphasize the everyday nature of this argument, Jackie interrupts Ruby’s dramatic exit with a reminder to take her dish to the sink.
This aching authenticity is exactly what writer-director Siân Heder and the entire cast of CODA brought to the film that took it from a trope-heavy coming-of-age story with an endearing, folksy soundtrack to a film deserving of the $25 million record-breaking sale to Apple TV+ after its award-winning Sundance debut.
While it may have started on the page, this authenticity weaved through every layer of the filmmaking process, especially when it came to casting. “Deaf characters shouldn’t be considered a costume that you put on and take off as a hearing person,” Matlin tells Glamour over Zoom. “So I don’t think you can authentically play a deaf character if you’re not deaf. It might have been that way in the past, and I think that just was rooted in ignorance.”
And with a mostly deaf cast (Jones, like her character, is hearing and underwent nine months of ASL training for the role), Heder tells Glamour that “deaf culture really made our set culture.”
“We discovered that ASL was this brilliant set language,” she says over the phone from the same Gloucester shores where CODA was filmed. “My A.D. and I were signing when we were out on the boat, and Emilia and I were signing with each other when she was on the cliff and I was down below in the quarry. What started as trying to figure out how to make our set accessible became a brilliant tool that we were all using.”
