THE STORY – In 1987, Marlee Matlin became the first Deaf actor to win an Academy Award and was thrust into the spotlight at 21 years old. Reflecting on her life in her primary language of American Sign Language, Marlee explores the complexities of what it means to be a trailblazer.
THE CAST – Marlee Matlin
THE TEAM – Shoshannah Stern (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 97 Minutes
In Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim’s documentary “Deaf President Now!” – one of two Sundance premieres that lends its focus to the Deaf community – one of the film’s four core subjects notes that when he was a child, his grandfather made it clear that it was his responsibility to adapt to his surroundings, not the other way around. “It’s very important that you fit into the hearing world,” Tim Rarus says, quoting his elder, who is also deaf. Yet Rarus couldn’t help but be left with an uncomfortable feeling like his grandfather was missing a point he didn’t even know was there or had never considered. “I was thinking, ‘Why?'” Rarus continued. “I shouldn’t have to fit into the hearing world. I have my own world.”
As “Deaf President Now!,” an illuminating work of journalism, delved further into similar ideas that the board of trustees at Gallaudet University (the country’s foremost college for deaf and hard of hearing students) attempted to peddle after appointing a hearing president over several qualified deaf candidates in 1988, the clearer it became that reading its subtitles wasn’t required in order to grasp its wealth of revelations. While closed captioning is on screen from beginning to end, interpreters can be heard throughout, dictating what the film’s subjects communicate through sign language.
Perhaps this would not have been clocked if not for the experience that Shoshannah Stern’s “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore“ – the second Deaf-centric doc at this year’s festival – provides its viewers, particularly how accommodating it is to the audience that can relate most to its subject. “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore“ might follow the beats of a celebrity bio-doc a bit too closely ever to transcend the increasingly tired genre’s trappings. Still, it offsets the typically frustrating elements of lesser works by making real filmmaking choices in how it communicates itself.
Rather than prioritizing a hearing audience, “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore“ begs those who live with such a privilege to try to experience the Deaf experience for size, splashing colorful subtitles across its interview footage and b-roll to craft a unique viewing experience. Even as it lends a great deal of focus to the more well-known aspects of Marlee Matlin’s life, many of them dark details – from the sexual abuse she experienced both as a child and in her relationship with her “Children of a Lesser God“ co-star William Hurt to her struggles with addiction – it persists with a brighter spirit, one that can be seen in many of its aesthetic choices. Matlin, who became the first deaf actor to win an Academy Award and has long been a trail-blazing activist for the Deaf community, is often seen with her legs stretched along a couch, Stern sitting opposite her, the two of them communicating freely in American Sign Language in an environment that feels far more akin to that of a girl’s night in than a documentary interview (complimentary).
It helps that, like Matlin, Stern is deaf, and her presence persists throughout the film in a more required than invasive manner. It takes a delicate directorial sense to successfully position oneself within the fabric of their own film, especially while its focus is supposed to be entirely elsewhere. But Stern doesn’t use Matlin’s story as a jumping-off point to tell her own story as a deaf director. But even if she had, it’s likely that it would have been handled with sincerity and consideration for an audience that tends not to see themselves on screen. Though telling Matlin’s story from beginning to present more than manages to achieve that on its own, an all-star slew of interviewees doesn’t hurt. Henry Winkler, with whom Matlin stayed for two years after getting sober in the 1980s, is a vital, emotionally resonant presence, as is Aaron Sorkin (who cast Matlin as a key player in all seven seasons of “The West Wing”), Troy Kotsur, her “CODA“ co-star who became the second deaf actor to be awarded an Oscar for his role in the Best Picture-winning film, and Jack Jason, Matlin’s long-time translator who appears both in person and in archival footage, consistently by her side.
What’s key, however, is that none of these figures speak for Matlin nor serve as protectors in her world, a world in which she may not be able to hear but one she has certainly crusaded through by emphasizing the “ability“ in “disability,“ to use a cheesy term that the documentary occasionally drifts toward explicitly stating itself. “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anyomore‘s” contents – Matlin’s own involvement in the “Deaf President Now!” movement being among them – are bound to remind one of another refrain that the aforementioned “Deaf President Now!“ documentary balks at itself, one from Jane Bassett Spilman, the former Chair of Gallaudet University’s Board of Trustees: “Deaf people are not ready to function in the hearing world.“ Note that she refers to “the“ hearing world, a finite descriptor that limits all of its prospects only to those who can make out what is said verbally. Yet, according to some, Matlin has achieved far more than many of her contemporaries despite her not being ready to function. Stern is hell-bent on depicting the actor as the embodiment of courage, not a victim of circumstance or disability. Occasionally, “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore“ might feel a little too immersed in pushing that tone forward. Still, the combination of its subject and its inclusive filmmaking style makes it easier to overlook than it might be otherwise.
