Shoshannah Stern’s study of Marlee Matlin is a film with a real story to tell, about a woman who became a compelling figure in American public life. She is perhaps destined to be known chiefly as the first deaf performer to win an Oscar, for the movie Children of a Lesser God in 1987, but she also campaigned to ensure that Washington DC’s Gallaudet University for deaf and hearing-impaired people had a deaf president, and that all new TV sets were built with optional closed-captioning for deaf people. Generally, she has conducted an ongoing campaign to do away with the condescension of pity, and to raise awareness among hearing people about deaf people’s consciousness and culture, particularly in sign language.
Matlin revealed something more in her 2009 autobiography I’ll Scream Later: a history of drug addiction (the Betty Ford clinic told her she had to pay for her own interpreter) and of being sexually abused as a child. She also revealed she’d been abused as an adult by her partner William Hurt, her method-acting co-star in Children of a Lesser God, who was perhaps less than delighted to see all the acclaim go to her and was, in a pre-#MeToo period of exposure, singularly unrepentant. There are some toe-curling TV clips of Matlin being patronised by pundits as the “sympathy vote” candidate ahead of the 1987 Oscars, and Stern also perhaps mischievously catches out some people in the present day: Nicole Kidman didn’t look entirely relaxed applauding in sign language as the drama Coda, about a hearing girl in a deaf family, won at the 2022 Oscars.
This is an engaging and thoroughly worthwhile movie. I myself am agnostic, to say the least, about the crowd-pleasing Coda, of which Matlin was a part, but it certainly could not have existed without her and her achievements. Children of a Lesser God is a more self-conscious issue movie, though, perhaps oddly, this documentary doesn’t point out its fundamental flaw: Matlin’s character is not subtitled, so Hurt’s character cumbersomely has to vocalise what she signs for the hearing audience’s benefit, as if pondering it to himself. This film makes a rather interesting case that Matlin’s achievements showed up as much or more on TV, with her sparkling small roles on Seinfeld and The West Wing. Either way, Matlin is an American pioneer.