Randa Haines’s film of Mark Medoff’s play is well made and well acted, and Marlee Matlin is the reason to see it. But it has William Hurt speak aloud every line she signs, so we never once meet her on her own terms.
James Leeds (William Hurt) arrives at a residential school for the deaf to teach speech, and finds a headmaster who would rather he did it quietly. Sarah Norman (Marlee Matlin) was a pupil here and stayed on as a cleaner. She signs, fast and without apology, and she will not speak or read lips, because she did both as a child and was laughed at for it. He decides she is a project. Randa Haines’s film of Mark Medoff’s play, adapted by Medoff and Hesper Anderson, is a love story about two people who cannot agree on what a conversation is. It is well made and well acted, and it is built on one decision that keeps it from being better than good.
Matlin first. She plays Sarah with her whole upper body: a shrug that is a sentence, a flat hand that is a door shut in his face. When she has finished with James she turns her back, and the scene is over whether he likes it or not. At dinner, asked why she will not learn to speak, she tells him she does not do things she cannot do well, and Matlin lets us see that this is true and also a wall. It is a performance of refusal that never once looks like sulking. We had expected to admire it; we had not expected to want to be on her side against the film.
Because the film is on his. On stage, James voicing Sarah’s signs was a necessity. Here it is a choice, and Haines makes it in every scene: Hurt repeats aloud what Sarah has just said, then answers it, so both halves of every argument arrive in his voice. Sarah’s words reach us already translated, in the mouth of the man who wants to change her. We noticed it in the first ten minutes; by the hour mark it had begun to irritate us, and then to look like the film’s real subject, one the film had not noticed it had. Hurt is good, all the same. He does the classroom charm and the jokes to win the class, and under them a teacher’s habit of not hearing the answer he did not want.
John Seale shoots the school in grey coastal light, brick and long corridors and the sea at the end of every road, and he gives the water the film’s few moments of quiet. Sarah swimming alone in the pool at night is the one time we are left with her and nobody explaining. Gene Callahan’s school is old, over-heated and slightly shabby, a place where nothing has been changed since the parents last visited. Renée April keeps Sarah in dark work clothes for most of the first hour, so that when she dresses for dinner we notice. Michael Convertino’s score is soft and insistent and tells us to feel what Matlin has already made us feel. Lisa Fruchtman cuts the classroom scenes briskly and lets the two-handers run, which is right.
The classroom is where the film is happiest. James teaches speech by turning the music up until the pupils can feel it in the floor, and Allison Gompf’s Lydia, who has a crush on him and works at her vowels as if her life depended on it, is the warmest thing in the picture. Philip Bosco’s Dr. Curtis Franklin runs the school on the principle that nobody should make a fuss and is wearily unsurprised when somebody does. Piper Laurie has one long scene as Mrs. Norman, the mother Sarah has not seen in years, and plays it as hospitality with the heating off.
What the film lacks is a second argument. He wants her to speak; she will not; he tries again. The play had the same shape, and on stage the repetition is the drama. On screen, at 119 minutes, we began to feel we were watching the same quarrel in different rooms, and the second half, which takes a turn we will not describe, raises the volume rather than the stakes.
It is still worth an evening, and Matlin is worth two. Watch it with someone who will argue afterwards about whether James is patient or a bully, because the film thinks he is patient and is not entirely sure. It carries a 15 certificate and opened in British cinemas on 27 February 1987.
