Weston Library Film Club: CODA
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CODA 2021 111 minutes In this coming of age film set in Gloucester, Emilia Jones plays Ruby Rossi, the teenage daughter of a fisherman and the only member of her family who can hear. Setting out to sea well before dawn most mornings, Ruby is a capable crewmember on her father’s trawler while balancing the pressures of high school. With graduation in sight, it is assumed that Ruby will continue fishing as her family depends on her to bridge the gap with the hearing world. But Ruby has a knack for singing, and when she tries out for her high school glee club, her curmudgeonly teacher (played by a wonderful Eugenio Derbez) spots her talent and tries to steer her towards a scholarship at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. Faced with her family’s ambivalence about a passion skill they cannot share along with her mentor’s expectations—not to mention all the angst of being a seventeen-year-old, Ruby faces some hard choices. What makes this film extraordinary is that Cambridge-born director Sian Heder came back to her home-state with a French production company that caught the essence of Cape Ann better than most American films have managed. That authenticity extends to Ruby’s family, with Heder having cast deaf actors Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur, and Daniel Durant as Ruby’s mother, father and brother. Although it is not without contentious aspects, CODA (Child of Deaf Adults) is at turns earthy, wistful, and at moments heartbreaking—resulting in one of the better films set in Massach
