The film is a meticulously, perhaps even cynically crafted crowd-pleaser. It’s the film’s secret weapon, expertly deployed in one final number that sees her serenade her father beneath the stars. Her singing voice has a wistful, lilting quality infused with longing and a little loneliness. To her credit, British actor Jones is pretty much note-perfect. Heder mostly gets around this by dazzling the audience with Ruby’s tender, go-for-broke sincerity. A wasted opportunity, then, that the film, as with the original, filters their experiences through an able-bodied protagonist. Moments such as this define the deaf members of the Rossi family – their humour, their politics, their parenting, their desires. The Gallic humour of the original film feels playfully raunchy when translated to an American context. Miles learns the hard way what the ASL for “put a helmet on that, soldier” is. When she and Miles accidentally overhear her parents in the bedroom, Frank sits them down for a cringe-inducing conversation about safe sex. Unlike the shy, responsible Ruby, her brother and her parents are in frequent pursuit of their own pleasure, something the film has a tendency to temper by playing for laughs. Swiping through son Leo’s Tinder prospects is permitted, however, as “something we can all do as a family”. Frustrated by Ruby’s obsession with music, Jackie bans headphones at the dinner table. The deaf actor gives a complex performance in a juicy role, her most high-profile since her landmark Oscar win for Children of a Lesser God in 1987. She asks the question with a whisker of resentment. “If I was blind, would it make you want to paint?” needles Ruby’s mother, Jackie (Marlee Matlin), a former pageant queen struggling, for various reasons, to connect with her daughter. Instead, scenes in which we hear Ruby sing, including one where she reluctantly, then ferociously, belts out Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now, are grounded in emotion, not spectacle.
Coda 2 review series#
Heder chooses not to structure the film as a series of showy musical numbers.
Coda 2 review tv#
If this sounds worryingly like an episode of the shrill teen TV show Glee, mercifully it couldn’t be less like it. The two are to perform Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s Motown hit You’re All I Need to Get By at the school concert, an excuse for them to practise a cappella in Ruby’s cramped bedroom. Equipped with an endless supply of motivational quotes and quirky cardigans, he prescribes her breathing exercises and a duet with – eek! – her crush, Miles ( Sing Street star Ferdia Walsh-Peelo). Her music teacher, Bernardo “Mr V” Villalobos (Eugenio Derbez, straining for inspirational cuddliness), takes note of her forthright talent as well as her faltering confidence, insisting she work towards auditioning for Boston’s Berklee College of Music. It’s a full-time commitment that competes with her schoolwork, her social life and, now, choir practice, which she signs up for on a whim. Ruby is a Coda – a hearing child of deaf adults – and as her brother is also deaf, she serves as the whole family’s unofficial interpreter, translating their American Sign Language (ASL) to both the local fishing community and the meddling authorities. Writer-director ( Tallulah) takes great care to increase and improve the long-overdue representation of the deaf community on screen, casting deaf actors in deaf roles (a responsibility the original film neglected). It’s not hard to see why: it’s warm, fuzzy and feelgood, taking a timeless coming-of-age tale and braiding it with a timely political agenda. This US remake of the 2014 French comedy-drama La Famille Bélier, about the hearing daughter of deaf parents who secretly dreams of becoming a singer, was a smash hit at this year’s Sundance film festival, winning a record-breaking $25m distribution deal with Apple TV+ as well as four of the festival’s top awards. The film soon reveals it’s not that they haven’t noticed – it’s that they haven’t heard. Her voice is striking and lovely, not that her dad, Frank (a wonderful, drily funny Troy Kotsur), or older brother, Leo (Daniel Durant), seem to pay it any attention. She squeezes her eyes shut, a groove gripping her shoulders. Sorting through the daily catch aboard her family’s fishing boat in Massachusetts, the 17-year-old high school student croons Etta James’s classic Something’s Gotta Hold on Me with unselfconscious abandon. W hen Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) sings, she gets a good feeling.
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