We meet the teenaged Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones) working on her family’s fishing boat off the Massachusetts coast, blasting music on a radio and singing along as she helps her father, Frank (Troy Kotsur), and older brother, Leo (Daniel Durant), pull in nets and sort the catch. As Ruby rocks out, her family members take no notice of the noise, and only when you see her have to catch their attention with a wave that it falls into place that the men are deaf. Sian Heder’s CODA filters a coming-of-age story through the prism of its protagonist’s status as the one hearing member of her family, adding a wrinkle to the usual tales of awkward high-school experiences and the first steps toward adulthood.
The first half is largely defined by setting up Ruby’s dynamic with her relatives at home and with classmates at school. The latter tend to be judgmental bullies regarding Ruby’s working-class roots and her family’s disability, which feels true to the lineage of high-school movies about misfits but otherwise anachronistic to a modern social climate. Much richer are the scenes of Ruby’s home life, which are filled with as much humor as frustration. Ruby, the designated interpreter for her relatives, has to communicate for them to the outside world, even having to explain to doctors her dad’s jock itch and how it’s spread to her mom, Jackie (Marlee Matlin), through sex. More broadly, she has spent her life being the only one to hear other people’s sniggering jokes about her loved ones, and the natural moodiness of adolescence has only heightened a lifelong anxiety of enduring the ridicule aimed at her kin. But Frank, Jackie and Leo make a comfortable and loving home, and many scenes of their casual farting or the parents’ loud sex have a refreshingly candid comedy to them.
For all the homey quality of the Rossi house, Ruby understandably feels an urge to leave the nest and live her own life. She gets a hint of what she might want from adulthood from a musical audition that gives her an outlet for her singing passion. This plotline is where CODA gets bogged down in some of the more played-out tropes of coming-of-age fiction. The music teacher, Mr. Villalobos (Eugenio Derbez), is a fussy and demanding taskmaster who went to Berklee but somehow ended up an instructor at a public school in a fishing town. He, of course, is the figure to help Ruby channel all her buried frustrations and longing into breakthrough confidence in her music, and plants in her mind the dream of going to college. This is hackneyed enough, but things get even worse when the family’s finances become jeopardized by the vagaries of the fishing industry and they need Ruby to help out even more with work, something that Villalobos refuses to entertain for even a second to excuse her lateness to lessons.
The film recovers in the final act, when the exhausting and manufactured conflicts that erupt between Ruby and her codependent family and between the girl and her bossy and uncompromising tutor give way to an expected but nonetheless moving conclusion. It’s conspicuous that the massive problems facing the family’s financial future recede into the background just as quickly as they emerge, but the film gets back to the lower stakes that suit it as Ruby tries to reconcile her loyalty and necessity to her folks with her preparations for life after high school. There’s nothing quite as humbly but powerfully observed as the material of the first half, where much could be said in the halting way Ruby confesses that she “talked funny” when she first came to school from having grown up in a deaf household to the side explorations of Leo’s own struggles to be taken seriously by others and how he seems so much wearier and more grizzled despite being only a few years older than his sister. It’s in these smaller moments of navigating the world with and on behalf of those with disabilities that CODA is most captivating, showing a tender insight into its characters that is too often steamrolled by narrative contrivance.
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