When Ruby is first seen on the boat, she’s singing along with a record of Etta James, and guess what: Ruby’s way out involves singing. It isn’t only the movie’s bright and perky tone that thrusts its characters risk-free into a risky world but also the contours of the drama itself, the kinds of events that are shown and the kinds that aren’t, the character traits that are defined (with the cinematic equivalent of Day-Glo highlighters) and the ones that are neglected.
The drama depends on sustaining a viewer’s rooting interest while keeping it unthreatened with the actual possibility of loss. It’s an achievement of sorts-a display of craft that’s also a kind of craftiness-to establish a level of predictability that both guarantees a payoff and maintains a low simmer of suspense. The narrative cards all come up aces, as is predictable from the moment that they’re dealt. It’s no spoiler, alas, to know that all comes out well in the end for all concerned. The drama involves Ruby’s efforts to develop a life of her own, to break away from her family without breaking with it-even as she recognizes that her independent activities and her extended absence may threaten her family’s livelihood. She goes out on the boat each morning with Leo and their father, and, back on shore, negotiates the sale of their catch to a wholesaler who, they’re convinced, takes advantage of them as deaf people (and of Ruby as a child).
Ruby is a hearing person but fluent in American Sign Language, and her life revolves around the family business.
It focusses on one of the Rossi children, Ruby (Emilia Jones), a seventeen-year-old high-school senior whose parents, Jackie (Marlee Matlin) and Frank (Troy Kotsur), are deaf, as is her older brother, Leo (Daniel Durant). The movie, written and directed by Sian Heder, is based on the 2014 French film “The Bélier Family” it’s the story of the Rossis, a third-generation fishing family in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
#CODA MOVIE FOR FREE#
But “CODA,” an Oscar nominee for Best Picture that’s playing for free in select theatres this weekend (and is already streaming on Apple TV+), had the opposite effect on me. It’s meant, all too conspicuously, as a feel-good movie.
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