Sundance Review: ‘CODA’ Deploys A Plot You’ve Seen Before
Pursuing your dreams and meeting the expectations of your parents is a coming of age conflict as old as time. It involves parental friction, the desire for independence, and most importantly the need for self-identity. The teen at the center of conflict usually discovers something they’re adept at, but can’t manage current obligations with their newfound interests. The two compete for time until two significant events overlap and the teen is forced to choose, resulting in strife on both sides. After scenes of reflection, the parents and child reconcile, accepting the child’s dreams and riding off into the sunset with newly minted understanding for one another.
It is textbook YA drama and it is the arc central to Siân Heder’s CODA. In this rendition, Ruby is a high schooler who helps support her family by fishing off the coast of New England before first period. She is the only hearing member of her family, making her essential to carrying out essential parts of the business. After she picks up choir as an elective, her teacher tells her she has real talent as a singer, so much so that she should start training for Berklee College of Music. When her family starts their own fishing co-op, Ruby’s two worlds start to collide in conflicting ways, forcing her to choose family or passion.
It is no later than Roby’s discovery moment when you immediately pick up on CODA’s trajectory. You may wonder why such a cliched arc is so easy to predict, and it’s probably because you’re a fellow twenty something who grew up in the 2000s watching Troy Bolton choose between playing in the championship basketball or singing in the high school musical with Gabriella Montez. While specifics vary, CODA’s thematic arc is, in essence, the same thing.
As the film goes through these motions, Heder will implement a type of humor that is capable of alienation. Think raunchy, but not enough to toe the R-rating. It can induce a heavy amount of cringe — parents having audible sex while your crush is over or your dad farting at the dinner table are exemplary of this — and it comes to characterize the overall levity of the story, for better and worse.
CODA is a Sundance product of the American indie variety through and through. If you like previous festival crowd-pleasers like Brittany Runs a Marathon or Hearts Beat Loud (another film that plays to the themes in CODA), this is for you. But if you found yourself in the opposite camp for those films, you won’t find much here, unfortunately.
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