Children of a Lesser God (1986)

 

Kærlighed uden ord

We are staying with a romantic drama, but compared to last weeks “A room with a View”, we are at the other end of the scale. This was not really my jam.

James Leeds (William Hunt) starts working as a teacher on a school for the deaf and severely hearing impaired. His speciality is teaching the deaf to speak... I will let that stand for a moment. James is a very involved teacher who gets very close to his students. One of his students is Sarah Norman (Marlee Matlin) who technically is not a student, but a former pupil, now janitor, on the school and technically not his student because she is not interested in learning to speak.

None of this seems to deter James. He is romantically interested in Sarah and through persistence he manages to wear down enough of her defences to get into her pants. James is a man with a mission. He sees Sarah as a bright girl who just needs to be able to speak to be able to fulfil her potential which goes beyond cleaning the floors of the school. This is the one item where Sarah holds her ground. She sees absolutely no reason to learn to speak and, in fact, find it problematic that she needs to accommodate him rather than he meet her in her world of silence. The crisis in the movie is that this argument comes to a head and Sarah leaves James.

I think my problem with “Children of a Lesser God” primarily is that if you take away that most of the characters are deaf and communicate in sign language, this is a very trivial romantic drama, essentially a Hallmark mass produced item. There is not that much at stake and there is only a crisis because of bull-headed insistence. In this respect there was a lot more meat on “A Room with a View”. A second reason is that the character of James Leeds is problematic on three accounts. He starts a relationship with a student, never mind she is technically an employee, but she is still his student. That is a major no-go in my book and frankly creepy. Secondly, he is stalking her and pushing her rather than respecting her rejections. We are supposed to see his interest as a good thing, to help her, but to me, he is coming on way too hard. Getting that treatment from a teacher or colleague is unacceptable. Thirdly, everything happens on James’ terms. It is his projects, his goals, his world which is the right one. If you at any moment was in doubt of that, observing him at the deaf party of Sarah’s friends was very convincing. He could not accept her being happy if it was not on his terms.

Not everything is bad though. Both Hurt and Matlin deliver extraordinary performances (Matlin got herself an Academy Award for this) and having so many of the deaf in significant roles was definitely a positive. Matlin herself is almost entirely deaf and has made a career out of playing deaf roles. Unfortunately, the movie dares not take us all the way into the world of the deaf. All conversations in sign language are spoken out in plain language by the receiver, which is something I doubt would happen in reality and is frankly disturbing. What would have been interesting was if the deaf had been communicating entirely in sign language and we get the silence and a translation through subtitles. That would make us experience their world and elevate them to equal partners to the hearing. Instead, as the title hints at, the constant translation to spoken language makes them into deficient beings. This would of course have required that the audience would have to READ while watching, oh horror.

Maybe it is a period thing, the eighties are far away, but “Children of a Lesser God” comes across as a missed opportunity. For a movie trying to present the hearing impaired as fully equal to the rest of us with emphasis on accept, it falls short and often gives the opposite impression. Insisting that the deaf speak despite their humiliation, refusing to let their language stand alone and elevating a character to hero status who wants to mould them into an inferior version of the hearing. On top, to wrap this “message” into an insipid and trivial romance with the outcome telegraphed to not the deaf but the mentally impaired.

I love the deaf characters, but the movie is terrible.