Marlee Matlin has been fending for the record of being the youngest BEST ACTRESS winner in Oscar's history for 26 years now (at the age of 21), which is rehashed by this year's Jennifer Lawrence's winning (at the age of 22), a closest challenger ever. What intrigues me is how Academy would grant its top honor to such a youngster? I reckon she must play a role older than her real age (as Lawrence did in SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK 2012, 7/10) apart from her differing ability. And my guess is right, it is a meaty role would elicit an actress' all-out capacity to catch the attention and empathy from beholders, plus Matlin is gorgeously beautiful in person, from an anger-ridden minimal-wager earner to a feisty woman yearning for independence and not pandering for her lover's conventional salvation, a deaf woman's own silent world is her own powerhouse, arms her with determination and self-confidence. The film is directed by female director Randa Haines and adapted from Mark Medoff's Broadway play, a touch of sentimentality is abiding throughout, goes with the saccharine score by Michael Convertino.
The other half of the film is William Hurt, the sensual leading man of 1980s' Hollywoodland, he is a speech teacher for deaf children and is besotted with Matlin's eccentricities, he is not a flawless romantic prince, he can rescue her from mundane chores but his insistence of her to speak (in spite of her deafness) denotes a generalized point of view of patronizing the impaired, trying to change them to cater for the life the society designs while being blind to their real needs, aka, he can never enter into her silence, a message being clearly disseminated during their altercation. Hurt is also admirable in learning all the sign languages in the film (by comparison, Piper Laurie as Matlin's mother, is barely trying to do so for communication, not Laurie's fault though since it reflects pitch perfect how their relationship is, and Laurie earned a surprising third Oscar nomination despite of her character's sparing screen time), and the chemistry between him and Matlin makes wonder, how one can forget the aesthetically stunning underwater shots when they accept each other in the swimming pool for the very first time.
One distinguished feature is there is no dubbing of sign languages in the films, instead they are all interpreted by the recipients by words, so for the majority who don't learn sign languages, what we are able to understand is the secondary information reiterated by another person (mainly Hurt in this case), which in a way bars our immediate perception and we also feel frustrated inasmuch as the language barrier is too obvious to overcome. The happy ending may not be an overused cliché as that time, but watching it in the year of 2013, it alleviates the gravitas of the kernel, it is more like a mismatched pair than a happy-ever-after fairytale, one can imagine their future would still be choppy because independence takes no middle ground in its process, in any rate, the film could only be referred as in its half way of being great.
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