There are certain minorities that are not often represented in films, and the deaf is one of these groups. It is fascinating to watch this film, as it provides an insight into working with the deaf, and trying to make it so they can cope in a world full of noises. William Hurt gives off a very naturalistic performance, managing to add eccentricity to his role without overdoing it, and his acting also includes having to sign naturally. Even though it seems like an audience pleaser to have him translate out loud everything that Marlee Matlin is saying, it is still a credible performance. Matlin is also very good, deaf in real life, and she won an Oscar for her role. The film is let down however by the choice of a generic plot structure. The impending character relationships and storyline are very predictable, although the screenplay has some interesting ideas to keep it afloat. A lot of the film is concerned with being able to accept a person for who he or she is, and whether one should adjust one's ways or having others adjust for them. It is a good film, and has careful sound mixing work too. Matlin's constant anger is perhaps not realistic, and it is very easy to see where the film is going, but these points do not stop it from being effective viewing and good film-making in general.
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sol-17 November 2005
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gavin69426 November 2015James (William Hurt) is a new speech teacher at a school for the deaf. He falls for Sarah (Marlee Matlin), a pupil who decided to stay on at the school rather than venture into the big bad world. She shuns him at first, refusing to read his lips and only using signs. Will her feelings change over time? Every so often a different sort of love story comes along. This is one of those, featuring a deaf woman and a man who wants to be her teacher (and more). It is interesting, and one has to wonder how deaf people react to it. Is this a compassionate and understanding film, or is it exploiting the deaf community? Certainly it seems that the intentions were good.
Marlee Matlin is excellent, and it's nice to see she was honored for her role. I mean, I guess it's not a huge stretch to play a deaf woman, but it was probably an emotional role for her, knowing she was representing a great many people. -
Eumenides_010 May 2009Children of a Lesser God is a sensitive love story about James, a speech teacher who moves to a new deaf school and falls for introverted Sarah, a former student who decided to stay in the school because she can't relate with people.
This movie is basically a story about overcoming the difficulties of communication between two people, but it's never that simple since Sarah has one of the strongest and most defensive personalities ever seen in a movie.
As a deaf person, Sarah decided to rely on sex to gain men's affections and so can't commit to a meaningful relationship. She also fears James will treat her like everyone else always has. It's up to him to prove her wrong.
William Hurt and Marlee Matlin are both perfect in this movie. The '80s were a great decade for Hurt, and he was already riding on the success of his previous Oscar victory. One could only expect a great performance from him. It's Matlin who's the revelation here, conveying her personality through body language and sign language. She proved that acting has nothing to do with words and deserve the Oscar for this performance.
This movie is slow, sometimes dull, but for those with patience, it'll be quite rewarding on an emotional level. -
Spud-382 April 2004Hollywood is full of overly wrought love stories in which the conflict seems contrived merely to create drama or comedy or both. In Children of a Lesser God the love is so simple, and the conflict so believable, that it feels less like watching a movie, and more like watching friends walk through their own personal story. The attraction between Matlin and Hurt is obvious, but genuine, and is filled with the kind of "touches" that make it feel real. It is also a visually beautiful film. Each shot is set like a still photographer capturing an image. The overwhelming beauty of the New Brunswick coast creates a background for the film that leaves one with the feeling of watching a moving painting. Matlin has unfortunately not since been offered anything near this piece in which to display her amazing talent. It is a shame that a woman who could stand alongside Katherine Hepburn and Jodie Foster as all time great actresses is not having the opportunity to display that talent because of her hearing disability.
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itamarscomix5 November 2011Children of a Lesser God is worth watching, if for nothing else, for Marlee Matlin's star-making, Oscar-winning performance. She's really so good that she managed to draw me into the movie and enjoy it without noticing all the flaws and problems - those came rushing at me a couple of hours after finishing it.
To be fair, even when Matlin isn't on screen, it's a beautiful movie, well-shot, well-made and very enjoyable, and very effective emotionally. But it uses every trick in the Hollywood book to manipulate the audience, while undermining its own flawed message at every turn.
Front and center to all these problems is William Hurt's character. Despite Hurt's best efforts, James comes off as weak and inconsistent. When he's working as a speech teacher, he's shown to be charismatic and talented, playing up the full "Dead Poets' Society" prototype of the teacher with unorthodox methods who is disliked by the administration but loved by his students. And yet, whenever he's with Sarah (Matlin), he's weak-minded, babbling and insensitive.
That serves to present him as condescending and irrational and make the viewer take Sarah's side on every argument, despite the fact that James, well, makes some pretty good points, and Sarah does her best to make things as complicated and melodramatic as possible at every turn, pick fights when there's no need for one, then back off at the last minute for no apparent reason. The whole thing feels like a rather cheap ploy to manipulate and guilt the viewer into taking he side he normally wouldn't; it also makes the romance between the two feel unconvincing and shallow from the very start. It's made worse by a sloppy ending, which makes us feel all warm inside while completely avoiding every issue raised throughout the movie.
The only reason I'm ranting so much about the movie is that I enjoyed it. A movie that should have been good but has some very basic but major flaws is more annoying than a bad movie. Keeping all that in mind, though, I still recommend Children of a Lesser God as a beautiful, enjoyable drama, that tells an interesting story and is intriguing enough to actually provoke discussion. -
SnoopyStyle2 May 2015James Leeds (William Hurt) is the new speech therapist at a school for the deaf. He has limited signing skills and is intrigued by Sarah Norman (Marlee Matlin). She was the school's most promising student but she is now the school's janitor. He tries to teach her to speak but she rejects him. She is filled with anger but eventually she allows him into her world.
It's the acting debut for Marlee Matlin and it's the first time I watched deaf acting. It was a revelation because she gives it so much emotions. She's doing acting like the old silent stars. It's amazing how visceral the fights become. It's a relatively simple romance but it's the signing that is so important. It broke down barriers at the time and literally gave cinema a new visual language. -
lasttimeisaw24 July 2013Marlee 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. -
cndiver8 November 2005Yes, this is a love story about two unusually attractive people but its power comes from Hurt and Matlin's ability to increasingly convey vulnerability and authenticity as they fight to become completely real to each other. Marlee in particular is remarkable in her expressiveness. There is a scene where she watches Hurt while she's in an indoor swimming pool and you only see her eyes over the edge of the pool -- but the depth and variety of what "just those eyes" express!
Because all of us intuitively know what they are going through as they strip away layer after layer -- who of us hasn't feared exposure of the person we feel the world shouldn't see? -- we are drawn into their revealing their secret selves because we wish we knew who OUR OWN secret self is.
And the film is funny, engaging, touching, crazy and human! -
Mr-Fusion13 June 2015Marlee Matlin may have taken home Oscar gold for "Children of a Lesser God" (and she deserved it) but I really do have a newfound respect for William Hurt after watching this. Using Matlin's singing as a comparison, you can tell that he really put in the time to learn sign language for the role. And he has the largely thankless role of interpreting both characters during dialogue scenes. I dunno, I just liked him very much here; he was a great teacher, very sympathetic, and integral in the film's sincerity.
And if you can get past that oppressive sore, this is overall a great romantic drama.
7/10 -
gwithers15 January 2003This is one my favorite movies of all time. The quality of the acting leaves me breathless. The scene where Sarah is dancing slowly to a song by the Staples Singers says so much - the tempo is fast and most people were disco dancing or "stepping" to "I'll Take You There." Sarah feels the real underlying slow beat of the music and responds to that. It was a very moving scene.
Piper Laurie as her mother was phenomenol. Her expressions and body language said so much more than her words. You could tell she really loved Sarah and was frustrated that she didn't really understand her. She also had a little bit of the "bury your head in the sand" approach to Sarah's deafness.
Sarah was determined to have the world accept her on HER own terms and simply turned her back on it when it did not. Sarah was intelligent, beautiful and fun. She couldn't understand why people seemed to define and categorize her by her deafness. She was so much more than that and William Hurt's (I don't remember his name in the movie) character was sensitive enough to recognize that. His character was a little condescending and pushy, and I can see where he would get on any girl's nerves because he was not a good listener. He wanted Sarah to be the person he though she should be and justified it under his guise of "helping" her to cope in a hearing world. She was smart enough to figure him out and reject his attempt to mold her.
You could feel Sarah's loneliness in her silent world and you knew that she wanted love, friends and happiness just like the rest of us, but didn't know if she would ever get them.
I really loved the character and the whole movie. It gave us a brief glimpse into a deaf person's world through some extraordinary scenes: Sarah swimming and describing to William Hurt exactly how she imagined waves sounded, and getting it right; Marian Lesser communicating only in sign language at the party which gave William Hurt's character a chance to see things from another perspective. I think he learned that there is more than one standard way to live and enjoy life and being unable to hear isn't the worst thing that could happen to a person. -
Although somewhat formulaic, I did enjoy this movie. Marlee Matlin was sensational playing against type considering her own triumphs and experience with deafness. By that I mean she would not have shirked speaking as a deaf person out of anger or resentment. Her own words describe it best - "I have always resisted putting limitations on myself, both professionally and personally." In the story, Matlin's character experiences a wide range of conflicting emotions on the way to falling in love with language instructor James Leeds (William Hurt). In so doing, she manages to repair a relationship with an estranged mother (Piper Laurie), who's only goal was to have her daughter achieve whatever she wanted in life. I liked the side stories with the teenage group in Leeds' class, their debut as the 'No-Tones' was an entertaining diversion from the main story. Overall a fine story of overcoming limitations and experiencing love where it wasn't expected.
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reneekittycat11 September 2005When I first saw this movie I knew only the hand alphabet, but this movie made me want to learn more. After years of picking up bits here and there I am amazed at how well William Hurt used signs. Personally I think basic sign language should be taught in all schools. This is a very touching love story and I never get tired of seeing it. James is not perfect as the teacher trying to deaf students to speak. He makes many mistakes, but you can see how he cares very much. The love he has for Sarah is very real. I felt so sorry for Sarah but I also knew that she was a survivor. I would love to have that kind of strength. I have seen Marlee Matlin in lots of things since this and she is definitely a great actor.
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namashi_13 March 2011Randa Haines 'Children of a Lesser God' is a Complex story, told in a mature manner. What also stands tall in this rather unique love-story, are it's performances by it's lead stars.
'Children Of A Lesser God' tells the story of a speech teacher at a school for deaf students, who falls in love with a deaf woman who also works there.
Though a love-story without any response half the time, this romantic-drama packs in some truly heartfelt moments. The writing in the first hour is superb. But dips in the second hour for a while, but a mature & real culmination makes up for it. Randa Haines understands this human story with maturity and her direction is perfect. Cinematography is good, so is the Editing.
Now to the performances! 'Children Of A Lesser God' would've been soul-less if not for it's performances. Marlee Matlin is Stunning in her Oscar & Golden-Globe-Winning Performance. She speaks through her eyes, and conveys all the emotions inside her. William Hurt is restrained all through. Piper Laurie is first-rate and leaves a strong impression. Philip Bosco is good.
On the whole, 'Children Of A Lesser God' is A Good Watch, without a shed of doubt. If it had a better second hour, I would have given this story a proper 9 on 10, nonetheless, I had an experience worth reviewing. -
moonspinner554 August 2006William Hurt, lean and handsome and focused, is forced to rely heavily on his frustrated good guy persona here, playing teacher at a school for the deaf who is appalled that a brilliant young deaf woman is also working at the school--but as a janitor. She's rebellious (and won't speak because of childhood traumas), he argues with her in sign language while speaking for himself and for her (for the audience's benefit), and they go around and around. It's like a deaf variation on "Two For the Seesaw". Marlee Matlin has a plum role here, and won a Best Actress Oscar, yet the arch of her character is rather dull--she's much more amazing at the beginning than at the end (she's softened, necessarily, by the film's built-in sentiment, but how far has she come? She still won't speak at the finale). The kids in Hurt's classroom are a fun, colorful bunch, and the picture has many romantic-but-edgy passages that keep it interesting, yet it's still quite tiring by the end. **1/2 from ****
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This is perhaps the most moving and thought-provoking film about love and being in a relationship that I have ever seen. Matlin takes your breath away as you fall in love with her and she breaks your heart. Randa Haines documents, meticulously, the real effort and struggle that must go into negotiating a romantic relationship between any two individuals, and also the priceless dividends we reap by doing so- namely, love, home, friendship, acceptance, family: life.
"Children of a Lesser god" allows you to think, feel, and experience the things all good movies should. I highly recommend it...Matlin gives an awe-inspiring performance, 100% deserving of the Oscar she won for it. William Hurt balances the entire film, a feat which perhaps made him even more deserving of an Academy Award. All-in-all, if you want to watch a movie that tackles the timeless and immortal themes of love, communication, our relationship to the world, our relationship to our significant other, and most importantly our relationship to ourselves, I highly recommend this film. It will move you to tears. -
Solid if unremarkable screen version of the Broadway play, starring Marlee Matlin before anyone knew who she was and William Hurt at the height of his mid-1980s popularity.
The film is sensitive and well-acted, but it never completely sheds its stage origins, and it has that faint whiff of school assembly lecture that many movies preaching tolerance for minority groups have. Matlin delivers a brave performance in her screen debut as a deaf student who falls in love with a professor; Hurt is said professor and delivers what he's asked to.
Also with Piper Laurie as Matlin's over-protective mother.
Grade: B+ -
maharani_md7 July 2000Hurt is excellent, Laurie and Bosco are outstanding, but Matlin gives one of the most amazing cinematic performances of all time. She is scintillating. The play is even more forceful with her gritty performance that it was with Phyllis Frielich on broadway. The direction makes up what it lacks in imagination with conviction and sincerity. I recommend it highly.
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nycritic30 May 2007Despite its apparent incursion into the groundbreaking and the unusual, CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD (and its God-awful title) is just another way of telling a story that is as perfunctory as the oldest love story you would find in any category romance section. The addition of a disability and the doctor's verve in introducing a New Way into a stagnant school is really no more than salad dressing -- by avoiding the real situation, Marlee Matlin's disability, and having William Hurt verbalize her emotions and her needs, we get only a fifty per cent of the picture and the story loses all of its punch. A much different picture, BABEL, presented a girl, Chieko, who was also a deaf-mute and needed to connect with Someone. With limited screen time, her story was the most memorable of the quartet, her lone cry as she let loose her pent-up feelings in front of a young detective who seemed to understand her loneliness as he recoiled in horror at the fact that she was a girl, plain and simple, and he couldn't take advantage of her, was something that has haunted me since. In CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD, Matlin also screams in rage, but by then, her emotions, her language -- everything about her -- has been spelled out to the public by Hurt's condescending manner that it muddles her own suffering. Yes, she goes through a lot; yes, she's so bottled up in her own baggage that any letting go, any real trust, becomes a litmus test. I think that the main problem with this badly titled movie is the time when it was made. Had it been done today, with today's production values, it would have been a much more rewarding experience, and the love story, as nearly impossible and daunting, would have really resonated. However, it's an okay movie that even with the large amount of faults within its fabric, should be seen.
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Maziun20 June 2014"Children of lesser god" is an unique movie. It was the first film directed by a woman (Randa Haines) to be Oscar nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Marlee Matlin is the youngest ever winner of a Best Actress Oscar. Matlin is also one of only four actresses to win the Best Actress Oscar for a debut film performance. The movie is one if the few movies about people with hearing problems and deafness. The film was the first major motion picture since the 1926 silent film You'd Be Surprised to cast a deaf / hearing impaired actor in a major role. Marlee Matlin has only one spoken line in English during the entire film. The rest of her performance is in American Sign Language.
The movie is based on critically acclaimed Broadway stage play that was very popular. The playwright Mark Medoff also wrote the screenplay for this movie. The film and source play's "Children of a Lesser God" title is derived from the twelfth chapter of Alfred Lord Tennysons "Idylls of the King" cycle of twelve narrative poems.
The screenplay is both simple and complex. Hollywood is full of love stories where there isn't really no humor and the drama feels forced. Here it all feels real. It feels like real life. The characters are well written and the conflicts the face are completely natural and believable. It's interesting that the movie starts like one of those movies about inspiring teacher , but slowly turns into wonderful melodrama. There are many scenes involving Hurt's work with the deaf children and they are good , but it's the love story that counts the most. The screenplay rightfully deserved the Oscar nominee.
The chemistry between Hurt and Matlin is brilliant. It's not strange , because they really felt in love with each other while making "COLG". They even lived together for few months after movie was finished and it's a sad thing that it didn't last. When you watch the movie you can see perhaps the most authentic romance I've ever seen in cinema.
Marlee Matlin is spectacular in here. You could say it's a kind of cheat for deaf person to play def person. It doesn't change the fact that she is wonderful . I've never thought that a sound of hand clapping other hand might be chilling (watch the movie – you will know what scene I'm talking about). Matlin is able to say so much with her hands or face . The only time she speaks it's truly heartbreaking.
William Hurt is in the shadow of Matlin , since he got the less interesting role. Still , he is great. He always was a master of subtlety and this movie is no exception. His character also changes and suffers during the movie. His also one of the best inspirational teachers in history of cinema.
Piper Laurie has not too much screen time , but beautifully makes a complex character of Sarah's mother. In hands of less skilled actress it would be a cliché character and trivial performance . Laurie gives the audience a character who isn't black or white and quite possible the one they could relate to the most.
The movie is very well directed by Randa Haines , which is surprising since it's her movie debut. Yet she never allows the movie to be too sentimental or manipulative with the viewer's emotions. The mix of humor and drama is perfect. The movie is also quite well photographed, the beauty of New Brunswick coast makes you wanna go there.
Some people are complaining that the movie is too noisy for a film about deafness , that there aren't any scenes that use silence. I don't really see a need for that. The use of sign language feels natural here. The subtitles would be distracting in my opinion. The movie does justice to deaf people portraying them as real people with ambitions , passions and desires , not like poor cripples.
This is a beautiful movie about acceptance , finding yourself and emotional growth. This is what love should be. Find out if the world of sound and world of silence can meet. I give it 9/10. -
gbill-7487718 April 2022A film that should get a lot of credit for at least broaching the subject of deafness, casting deaf actors (a first), and introducing us to 21-year-old Marlee Matlin, who's wonderful here. It has serious flaws in both the story and how it's told, however, which makes it fall short especially in 2022, after having seen a more three dimensional representation in the film Coda, which also stars Matlin. We get glimpses of the frustration of being deaf, but Children of a Lesser God is more focused on the relationship between a teacher (William Hurt) and a janitor (Matlin) than it is about going into depth on her struggles.
Oh, we see the deaf kids learn how to dance along to the song "Boomerang," one learn some profanity, and find out that Matlin's character is better than all the hearing girls in bed, but these are all pretty shallow things geared towards commercial appeal, and told mostly from the teacher's perspective. He's like a hearing savior, and it was a serious mistake to have Hurt vocalize all of the dialogue from the deaf characters rather than subtitle them. When Hurt was screaming at Matlin to speak HIS language and SPEAK to him, I felt like punching him in the face, a feeling possibly amplified by knowing some of the things he did to her in their personal life.
The deaf characters are humanized, however, and Matlin's character does get in a few moments to explain some of her emotions. Ordinarily I'd probably fall for the sweetness in the love story, but here I found myself thinking it was too commercial, with the gratuitous (though brief) nudity included. If it were made today, I'd probably knock my rating down a bit, but I respect the progress it represented in 1986, and loved Marlee Matlin. -
I enjoyed this movie because I understood, at least in part, the need for isolation as a defence against the world. I also believe that one can find someone to share the silence and it is that that makes being vulnerable worth it. Life can have a harmony of two together if you are willing to give it your all.
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....if this is not the very definition of love, I don't know which is. It's not all about you anymore, there's suddenly the other and that's what makes two.
One of the movies not wilted by the time, one of those movies you'd want a continuation - even 34 years later.
A more interesting version of Marlee Matlin - with curly brown hair and natural eyebrows which emphasize her beautiful eyes.
Great rendition, impressive film. I highly recommend. -
lee_eisenberg12 October 2019A few years ago I went to a session in a government building where they showed us "Children of a Lesser God". Unfortunately, we got less than halfway through, so I was only able to get the basic gist. Then a few months ago, Mark Medoff (who wrote the play on which the movie's based) died. I figured that I might as well watch the movie in his memory. It's one impressive piece of work. William Hurt's role as the teacher is a bit like the sort of role that Robin Williams occasionally played in dramas (the new person who comes in with his own ideas about how to do things, much to the chagrin of his superiors). But the bulk of the praise should go to Marlee Matlin, whose Oscar-winning role as the janitor makes her the only deaf person to have won an Academy Award, at least in an acting role (I don't know if any deaf people have won in non-acting fields).
It's truly a fine movie. It's a real pity that Randa Haines hasn't directed more movies (I suspect that they're not comfortable letting a woman direct). Moreover, the movie makes one understand the challenges faced by people with disabilities, whether physical or mental. If you ask me, sign language should be required so that deaf and mute people aren't so isolated. -
buonoart30 January 2024Marlee Matlin's performance was certainly deserving of an Oscar, notwithstanding her then-boyfriend William Hurt's odious remark asking her why she thought she was deserving of the award against so many older and more experienced nominees. Otherwise I was disappointed in the treatment this subject received. There is a powerful story to be told from Sarah (Matlin's) perspective but it is buried under a very standard rom-dram treatment and is unfortunately related from the point of view of the teacher, James (William Hurt), who in essence tries to break the wild mare Sarah represents. Of course this approach at the time was dictated by the constraints on making a commercially successful Hollywood film, but today it seems a bit disrespectful of the point of view of the hearing-impaired (for the record I am not hearing-impaired, so perhaps I am not even in a position to make this judgment). But to me it did seem to somehow trivialize the story and make it less impactful than it might have been.
Having a deaf central character was not novel at the time; Johnny Belinda comes immediately to mind. Having a deaf actor play the part, I believe, was novel and worthy of recognition all the way around.
The plot is otherwise quite formulaic and undramatic in that sense. Other commenters have made this point so I won't belabor it with my own examples. I will also agree that having William Hurt repeat vocally everything that Matlin signed (so the audience could understand it) quickly became tedious. Maybe subtitles wouldn't have worked either, but much of what Matlin's character was "saying" was obvious from the context or could have been gleaned from Hurt's responses. Certainly by the halfway point I knew the signs for "I love you" and this, at least, didn't have to be vocalized by Hurt every time Maitlan or Hurt said it (which is often). Imagine making this film in such a way that the audience could better appreciate the silent world of the deaf and in which the audience had to make an effort to understand what Matlin was saying, or to grasp what she meant or was feeling (at least some of the time). Now that would be a moving experience, and one closer to emotional reality. I wonder if it could be done?
Count me also as deploring the score; those synths which were maybe novel (and probably cheap) in the 1980s sound cheap and superficially plasticine today. The diegetic music, perhaps other than the Staples Singers, is also typically awful of some of the pop sounds of the era. -
So, this movie has been hailed, glorified, and carried to incredible heights. But in the end what is it really? Many of the ways in which it has been made to work for a hearing audience on the screen do not work. The fairly academic camera work keeps the signing obfuscated, and scenes that are in ASL are hard to follow as a result even for someone who is relatively fluent. The voice interpretation of Matlin's dialogue, under the excuse that Hurt's character "likes the sound of his voice", turns her more and more into a weird distant object as the film goes on. Matlin does shine in the few scenes where her signing is not partially hidden from view. But nonetheless, most of the movie, when this is a love story, is only showed from a single point of view, that of the man. As Ebert said, "If a story is about the battle of two people over the common ground on which they will communicate, it's not fair to make the whole movie on the terms of only one of them."
The idea that an oralist teacher who uses methods that have been imposed in many deaf schools for decades would be presented as "revolutionary" is fairly insulting in itself. His character becomes weakened as a credible teacher as the movie goes on. Drawing comedy from a deaf accent is, quite honestly, rather low. And his attitude towards the male students of his class is pretty symptomatic of how he seems to act with women: as an entitled man. A party scene involving a number of deaf people including a few academics meeting together leaves him seemingly isolated, in a way that's fairly inconsistent with his credentials: I have seen interpreters spontaneously switch to asl between each other even when they weren't aware of a deaf person being in the area, and yet somehow he feels like a fish out of the water in an environment his education should have made him perfectly used to. As a lover, he seems like a typical dogged nice guy, including his tendency to act possessively afterwards. And yet the movie is, indeed, only really seen through him, as everything his lover says is filtered through his voice.
The scenes involving the other deaf kids are, in general, wallbangers. The broken symbolism fails, the dance scene, the pool scene, even the initial sleep scene which is supposed to carry some of it - all these scenes that try to hint at the isolation of the deaf main character are broken metaphors, at best: many hearing people I know do dance on the bass beats that deaf people feel (instead of squirming like copulating chihuahuas), and going to take an evening dive for a hearing person is rarely an excuse to make a deep statement on the isolation of deafness (no, seriously, when I go swim, I go swim)...
It also fails at carrying the end of the play, instead making it a story of a deaf woman who submits to a strong man. Even though the original play ended with a more equal ground, where both have to accept each other as they are, and where he has to finally recognize her real voice is the movement of her hands, not the vibrations in her throat.
And for all the breakthrough that it may have seemed to be, Marlee Matlin remains Hollywood's token deaf woman to this day.