By STEVE MARTINDALE
For SS FILM FESTIVAL SOCIETY
At the age of 21, Marlee Matlin became a household name as the youngest-ever winner of the Best Actress Oscar for her groundbreaking performance as a teacher in a school for the deaf in the 1986 romantic drama Children of a Lesser God.
Also starring William Hurt, the film was directed by Randa Haines and was based on Mark Medoff’s Tony Award-winning 1979 stage play.
Matlin is now the subject of the award-winning documentary Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, being presented at ArtSpring by the Salt Spring Film Festival as part of their ongoing Best of the Fests series on Wednesday, Feb. 11 at 7:30 p.m.
After her Oscar win, Matlin went on to become Hollywood’s best-known deaf actor, appearing in dozens of films and television shows, including fan-favourite roles on The West Wing, Reasonable Doubts, Picket Fences and The L Word, as well as memorable guest appearances on Seinfeld, Glee, The Practice, ER, Sesame Street, Desperate Housewives and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
In the 2011 season of Celebrity Apprentice with Donald Trump, Matlin came in second place after country singer John Rich, raising awareness about accessibility rights for the hearing-impaired and also raising a cool million dollars for the Starkey Hearing Foundation.
The role that finally brought Matlin’s career full-circle, however, was in Sian Heder’s 2021 film CODA, which won the Oscar for Best Picture. As the film’s highest-profile star, Matlin had the power to insist that only deaf actors be cast to play deaf characters, which led to Troy Kotsur becoming the second deaf actor ever to win an Oscar.
At the Academy Awards ceremony that night, with the CODA filmmakers and the entire cast receiving a standing ovation, Matlin was at long last able to share a heartfelt and deceptively simple message from the stage in reference to her co-star’s award, 35 years after she had shattered that particular glass ceiling: “I’m not alone anymore.”
Directed by deaf actor and filmmaker Shoshannah Stern, this entertaining and enlightening film is also something of an experiential, empathy-building exercise, as the sound is intentionally modified to simulate the experience of hearing loss, forcing all viewers — regardless of the quality of their hearing — to rely on their eyes instead of their ears.
In addition to discussions of Matlin’s difficult childhood, her struggles with addiction and her abusive relationship with Hurt, one of the surprising revelations of this film is that Matlin was instrumental in introducing closed captioning, which the U.S. government legislated as mandatory in all new television sets after Matlin successfully lobbied Congress in the early 1990s to make broadcast television more accessible for the deaf and hearing-impaired.
Following the annual Salt Spring Film Festival at Gulf Islands Secondary School from Feb. 27 to March 1 — at which over 40 documentaries will be presented — the Best of the Fests series continues at ArtSpring with a bonus film to celebrate International Women’s Day in collaboration with The Circle Education Society: Between the Mountain and the Sky on Friday, March 6. Edited by Salt Spring resident Piet Suess, this award-winning documentary is an engaging profile of CNN Hero of the Year Maggie Doyne, who founded an orphanage and school in Nepal after adopting more than 50 orphans.