R | 1h 59min | Drama | 1986
A teacher at a school for the deaf and hearing-impaired, James Leeds (William Hurt) befriends Sarah Norman (Matlin), a former star student who, lingers at school, working as a lowly janitor; she’s like an echo that won’t fade.
Intrigued by her beauty, brains, and inexplicable belligerence, James falls for her, desperate to teach her to speak. She loves him, too, but won’t indulge him by speaking. She’s content getting by with superlative sign-language skills, unwilling even to master lip-reading. She feels suffocated by his insistence on drawing her into his world of sounds, as he does by her insistence on drawing him into her world of silence. Both are terrified of losing their separate selves in a swirling togetherness.
To James, this self-imposed ostracism is “stupid pride,” a deafness to more than sound. It’s a refusal to love by a refusal to be loved. To him, it’s straightforward: If you’re not mute, you must at least try to speak, even imperfectly, so you can better experience the world by participating in it, not cloistered with only those like you. Besides, those who aren’t deaf, but want to share their love with you, can more easily do just that. If language is a kind of reaching out, he’s making a stupendous effort in sign-language for her sake, while she’s making none for his.
But Sarah’s nursing old wounds: harassment as a child, ridicule at how guttural she sounded when she did speak, and alienation from her mother, Mrs. Norman (Piper Laurie). As the couple drifts apart, Sarah wonders if they can meet somewhere beyond, if not between, their sounds and silences. She thinks she doesn’t know what to do. Her mother’s convinced she does. But won’t that require both man and woman to talk and listen afresh?
Stone Deaf or Tone Deaf?
Ms. Matlin is brilliant, a frenzy of ASL-armed fingers and forearms who demands to be understood by James, even before she expresses herself. Hurt is superb, hurried in sharing everything with Sarah—his music, his friends, his home, himself. The filmmakers pick a romantic, not platonic friendship, to characterize speaking as masculine, active-proactive; hearing, as feminine, passive-reactive. Prominent references shape James as someone who might procreate, provide, and protect, and Sarah as someone who might nurse, nurture, and nourish, even if her roles in this relationship aren’t as clearly articulated.
Ms. Haines heightens the sense of sound, making otherwise mild sounds feel explosive: falling rain, a rustling curtain, a banging window-shutter, a chiming bell, whistling wind, or mewing seagulls.
How do a mother and baby understand each others’ unintelligible babble? The baby absorbs the mother’s totality: her sound, smile, and smell, not just her touch, better than adults who’ve mastered speech and hearing yet are clueless about what’s happening between mother and child. It may seem natural, even inevitable, but it does take two. The mother’s transfixed by her baby, to the exclusion of everything and everyone else. Likewise, her baby. It’s not that there’s no language. Rather there’s a new language, a fresh way of speaking, of being heard. After all, what are words but the children of thoughts? And aren’t profound silences just feelings made flesh?
