Review of Children of a Lesser God (1986) by Edith N — 25 Sep 2009

Not in Silence, Just in Sound.

I have silence issues. They are deep and long-standing, and I don't know what I'd do if I went deaf. Go crazier, I rather suspect. However, having gone to look at what he says about it, Roger Ebert is right. Again. This movie is never silent. Despite the whole, you know, point of the movie, we spend the whole movie bathed in sound. There's a lot of very bad music all over the place. The decision was made to have not subtitles but the hearing characters repeating everything the deaf characters say. There are places in the story where I think total silence would be more appropriate, places where the hearing character, for example, is out of place. Places where we are supposed to be sympathizing more with the deaf characters. The total silence would be difficult for me; it's half of why I watch so many movies, just for the pure sound of them. However, it would have been right over and over again, and instead, we just get the world of sound, even though the movie is supposed to be about both worlds.

James Leeds (William Hurt) has come to somewhere-or-another, I'm pretty sure New England (filmed in New Brunswick, not that that necessarily means anything), to work at a school for the deaf as a speech teacher. He has the requisite group of wacky students, none completely deaf but all severely hearing-impaired enough to end up at the school. He teaches them through personal charisma, questions that involve their own lives, and the aforementioned bad music. (Even mentioned as such by one of the parents.) He also becomes intrigued by the lovely and fiery Sarah Norman (Marlee Matlin), a former student at the school who now, at the age of twenty-five, works as a janitor. She was brilliant, but she has never done anything with it. She does not speak; she has never read lips. She is deaf from birth, and she has cut off contact with her family. Naturally, this makes her fascinating to him, and she is awfully beautiful, and they end up in a relationship made stormy by the fact that they come from different worlds.

See, here's the thing. They actually seriously considered a whole bunch of hearing actresses before settling on one who was actually deaf. (Well, she has 20% hearing in one ear.) Deaf people can, thanks to the "accent," pretty much only play deaf people, and they wanted to give the role to Heather freakin' Locklear. I have a lot of problems with this movie, not least that I think they're making deafness into a gimmick, but how much more so had they given the role to, dear Gods, Sarah Jessica Parker. I mean, no, Sarah is not so much with the speaking, but still. For one thing, I'm not sure a hearing actress could have the beautiful quality of her stillness. It's not just that she herself is beautiful, though I was struck by it over and over in the movie. Brooke Shields could have done beautiful. (Sarah Jessica Parker couldn't have, but she was closer then.) Gods know Jodie Foster could have acted the part with half her talent behind her back. But when Sarah's hands are still, there is something to Marlee Matlin that just pulls you in anyway. You are waiting for them to start.

On the other hand, this is, as I said before, a gimmick movie. It's the love between a Normal Person and a Different Person. He is Torn Between Two Worlds. And so on and so forth. We've seen this story before. We see it even now. It's intended to be all heartwarming, and the better versions of the story, which this one is, we actually get some depth to things. But this one doesn't want to tell us anything about who Sarah really is, either. Okay, she was a slut when she was younger so that she could have some contact--it's something she could do as well as or better than hearing girls. But what does she want from life? What is she good at? Who is she, in herself? We never really get it. Sure, she may not, either, but even at the end, she is Deaf Girl.

Of course, the filmmakers did, in the end, choose better than they probably knew--Marlee Matlin is the youngest woman to win Best Actress. There aren't a hell of a lot of disabled people to have won Oscars; there's Harold Russell (in my head, "the Guy With the Hands," though the important thing is that he didn't) and that's pretty much it. There also aren't many people (though of course the Guy With the Hands is one of them) to have won for their debut performances. Yeah, okay, I figure it must have been a bad year for Supporting Actress performances for Piper Laurie to have been nominated for this small, simple role, but Marlee Matlin? Yeah, all over that. It doesn't even matter that she is not reliably saying what William Hurt translates for her. In fact, the fact that she's talking about something else entirely almost makes it better. I wouldn't know that if I hadn't read it elsewhere, if people who actually know Amslan hadn't mentioned it. I'm told it's pretty funny, should you know what's going on.