CODA Review

Heder's remake of a French comedy does its homework where it counts: the deaf roles are played by deaf actors, the family's signing is fluent and full of jokes and insults rather than solemnity, and the fishing business is a real job with real margins and a quota problem. Troy Kotsur is the reason it works. Frank is crude, warm and entirely unsentimental about his own deafness, and the scene where he asks his daughter to sing again with his hands on her throat is earned rather than engineered.

Emilia Jones carries the singing, the signing and the resentment of being her family's permanent interpreter without letting any of it curdle into martyrdom. What holds the film back is its shape. Every beat, the encouraging music teacher, the audition, the crisis of loyalty, arrives exactly when you expect, and it would always rather reassure you than risk you. It took the year's biggest prize over far more ambitious work, and that is fair to hold against it. As writing about a family, though, it is warmer and sharper than the outline suggests.