All her life, Ruby Rossi has straddled two worlds: one filled with sound; the other, silence.
Well, that’s not quite accurate. Yes, Ruby’s mom, dad and big brother are all deaf. But sometimes, the Rossi home sounds like the inside of a drum. Father Frank pegs his gangsta rap to the max so he can feel the bass. Mother Jackie bangs plates and silverware as she cleans up the dinner table, having no clue that the racket might bother Ruby’s studying. And when Frank and the kids head out to fish at 3 a.m., the cold Atlantic echoes with Ruby singing along to the radio as Frank and Leo work, unheeding. It’s not that the Rossis don’t make noise: They just don’t hear it.
But when it comes time for conversation, it’s all flying fingers and exaggerated gestures. And when the Rossi family needs to interact with the hearing world, they turn to Ruby for help.
She fills that role of unpaid translator with competence, if not outright glee. Ruby loves her family, of course, but it hasn’t been easy being their bridge to wider society.
When she first started school, the other kids made fun of her because of the way she talked: She hadn’t grown up with English in her ears, so her way of talking sounded stilted and ugly. And when she did learn how to speak like all the other kids, she had to deal with the way they made their living. Fishing the waters off Massachusetts is hard, exhausting work. As soon as she was old enough, Ruby was helping on the boat—getting up in the wee hours to trawl the waters for flounder, then heading off to school after for a full day there. If she was lucky, she’d have time to take a shower first.
Her family needs her so much. Her peers think she’s weird, if they notice her at all. For her, school is an obligation; one more hardship in a hard life.
Until she notices a cute boy signing up for choir and, on a whim, she signs up as well.
Her first choir class is a complete disaster. When director Bernardo Villalobos—Mr. V to most of the class—asks her to sing, she bolts instead. “We’ve got a runner,” he quips.
But she returns, and Mr. V is impressed. In fact, he’s soon asking her if she’s considered going to college for music. She has the chops.
Ruby had never considered such a thing. Her family doesn’t have that kind of money. And besides, they need her at home. Who’ll interpret for them? Who’ll be their bridge?
But music: She suddenly understands what it means to her to sing, to hear, to fall into a melody. It’s her blood and breath. When she sings, it makes her feel as if she could fly.
Ruby knows her family would never understand her love of music. They literally couldn’t. To leave them for college would feel like a betrayal. But maybe to stay … would that also be a betrayal? Of herself?
Ruby Rossi has always straddled two worlds. And those worlds are about to collide.
Ruby’s family can be pretty rough around the edges, as we’ll see. But they’re also as tight-knit and caring as a family can be. Miles—the cute boy in Ruby’s choir class—sees it immediately. When Ruby says that her house is “disgusting,” Miles quickly contradicts her.
“It’s not,” he says. “It’s a home. You all work together and laugh, and my family is not like that.”
Ruby eventually sees the importance of her family, too. As Mr. V demands more and more from her, Ruby tells him how hard it is to choose between singing and her commitments at home. “I’ve never done anything without my family before,” she says.
But even though Ruby and the rest of the Rossis experience plenty of tension over the girl’s newfound love of singing, they also display a heartening ability to flex and grow. In one of the movie’s most touching scenes, Frank asks Ruby to sing for him. And as she does, he places her hands on her throat, to catch the vibrations.
And we shouldn’t discount Mr. V’s contribution to Ruby’s life, either. He volunteers to work with Ruby on evenings and weekends to help her prepare to audition for Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music. He doesn’t waste time on just anyone, Mr. V says. “If I’m offering, it’s because I hear something.” And through many fits and starts, the music director becomes an important mentor in Ruby’s life.
When Ruby expresses her disgust when her father passes gas, he tells her a joke: He says that God made farts smell “so deaf people could enjoy them, too.”
Leo derisively refers to his sister as “Saint Ruby.”
When Miles and Ruby hang out at Ruby’s house to practice a duet, they hear Ruby’s mother and father having very loud sex. We see Jackie on top and the two engaged in obviously sexual movements. Ruby reaches in and flashes the bedroom light—a signal for them to stop—and the four soon afterward have an awkward conversation.
It becomes all the more awkward when Ruby’s parents begin quizzing Miles about his intentions, graphically insisting (with comical hand pantomimes) that Miles always wear condoms. (The embarrassing conversation later gets around school, and someone in the lunchroom mocks Ruby by making overt sexual noises.)
Frank and Jackie weren’t supposed to be having sex anyway, given that both were dealing with a case of jock itch. After an incredibly graphic conversation with the doctor about their symptoms (which Ruby was forced to interpret), they were told to stay away from intercourse for two weeks. When Ruby asks why they didn’t, Frank simply signs that his wife is too “hot” and that he can’t control himself around her.
Gertie, Ruby’s best friend, is rather promiscuous. When she starts expressing some interest in Leo, Ruby’s brother, Ruby tries to dissuade her. “Dating for you just means sex,” Ruby tells her, encouraging her to just hit on her teachers instead—like she usually does, apparently. After a little more pressure, though, Ruby teaches Gertie how to come on to Leo in sign language. It’s a pretty provocative bit of signing—but in reality, the sign told Leo that Gertie had a venereal disease.
He and Gertie do eventually get together, and they make out passionately in a back room of a bar. (He holds her leg up as they kiss, and it clearly looks like they’re prepping to have sex.) Couples romantically kiss a few times. We hear (or see people sign) crude references to bits of sexual anatomy (including those on fish) and oral sex.
Mr. V makes his choir class sing “Let’s Get It On” and is appalled by their lack of enthusiasm. “You’re teenagers!” He shouts. “All you think about is getting it on!” We see Ruby and Miles in bathing suits. We hear that Jackie was a model and won the “Miss Yankee Pageant.” Leo flips through Tinder pictures at the dinner table. When Ruby protests, Jackie signs that it’s OK: “Tinder is something we can all do as a family.”
Leo gets into a fight at a bar, and both combatants land some pretty strong punches. Later, Leo’s offered some ice to take down the swelling on his shiner.
Miles and Ruby jump off some cliff faces into a lake waiting below. When they prepare to jump off a 40-foot cliff, Miles wryly wonders whether they should leave a note, so that folks who find their bodies won’t conclude the two committed suicide. “Let ’em wonder,” Ruby says. We hear another joking reference to murder.
We see lots of fish caught and examined and (in a surprise for me) stomped on a bit in buckets.
One f-word and around 15 s-words, along with a smattering of other, milder profanities. Many of the words are ones we see—via subtitles—rather than hear. We also hear a few misuses of God’s name.
Frank smokes a joint on the waterfront. When Ruby reminds him that they’re in public, he tells her, “It’s medical.” Ruby disagrees, signing that being deaf is probably not on the list of ailments treated by marijuana. There’s another reference to smoking a “bowl.”
Frank and others smoke cigarettes, too. Frank and Jackie drink during dinner—he beer, she wine. Leo (who’s out of high school at least) also drinks beer. Gertie works at a local watering hole. “You’re not even old enough to drink,” someone tells her. “These guys can’t count to 21,” she says. Miles says he remembers, as a child, seeing Ruby order two beers for her parents in a restaurant.
Ruby confesses that she was bullied for the way she talked. When she seems to use that experience as a crutch, Mr. V (who grew up in Mexico City and speaks with an accent), says, “You think you’re the only kid who ever got bullied? Who had a funny accent?”
We hear fishermen gripe about the impact of climate change, meddling governments and greedy middlemen. Some of those middlemen try to cheat those fishermen—especially Frank and Leo, whom they try to take advantage of. Others, intentionally or not, ignore members of the Rossi family.
[Spoiler Warning] When Ruby’s upset with her family, she doesn’t show up to work on the boat one morning. That just happens to be the morning that a government inspector shows up as well. When she realizes that both Frank and Leo are deaf, she tips off the Coast Guard, who try to get Frank’s boat (via radio and bullhorn) to slow down so they could board it. Obviously, they didn’t hear anything. Frank’s fined $2,500, and he’s ordered to have a hearing person aboard at all times.
CODA—an acronym which stands for Child of Deaf Adults—is a remake of a 2014 French film that centered around a family of deaf dairy farmers and their talented, hearing daughter. The new film wowed audiences at the Sundance Film Festival, and Apple TV+ eventually snapped up the rights to CODA for a Sundance record $25 million.
You can see why Sundance fell in love with it. This sweet, poignant, coming-of-age story feels both unique and universal. CODA ushers us into a world that few of us know much about and makes us feel … well, like a part of the family.
But that family comes with some problems, too.
Ruby says her fam is a “disaster.” That’s not true, of course: As mentioned, the Rossis love each other deeply and support one another almost always—even when it’s hard. Those two elements are critical components of any good family, and it’s great to see the film embrace those components with so much genuine affection.
But the Rossis are messy—incredibly messy, in fact. The idea that every one of these members have no problem shouting (or sign-shouting) or swearing at each other feels wildly alien to how I was raised or how I’ve tried to raise my own kids. If the affection is real, so is the lack of respect paired with crass, often ribald, exchanges between family members. And while love of family is a wonderful value to embrace, this family seems to hold few other God-honoring values that I can see.
In some respects, CODA speaks eloquently about what it means to grow up—feeling that push and pull between family and future. And when it comes to the importance of love and duty and pushing outside your comfort zone, it positively sings. But in other, important ways, CODA falls silent.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
