You won't be disappointed!

Powerful

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

James Leeds (William Hurt) is the new speech therapist at a school for the deaf. He has limited signing skills and is intrigued by Sarah Norman (Marlee Matlin). She was the school's most promising student but she is now the school's janitor. He tries to teach her to speak but she rejects him. She is filled with anger but eventually she allows him into her world.It's the acting debut for Marlee Matlin and it's the first time I watched deaf acting. It was a revelation because she gives it so much emotions. She's doing acting like the old silent stars. It's amazing how visceral the fights become. It's a relatively simple romance but it's the signing that is so important. It broke down barriers at the time and literally gave cinema a new visual language.

This is far from a perfect movie, but it's a really beautiful movie that manages evoke a lot of emotion out of you. My main advice for you is to be patient. It's deliberately slow-paced, but if you stick with it, you'll be rewarded with a great experience. I've never encountered a deaf person before, and I'm not really that knowledgeable about them. I'm even ashamed to admit that I don't know any sign language. I do know that they are difficult to handle, but they are still people, and you should treat them as such. The incredible performances are one of the main reasons why I liked this movie. Marlee Matlin deserved her Oscar. She's deaf in real life, but it was still an extremely impressive performance. She had some very intense scenes with William Hurt. Speaking of Hurt, he was phenomenal as well. His brash and ambitious methods were fun to watch. Piper Laurie is really good. I usually hate her method style of acting, but she was thankfully restrained here. Good stuff!This is a moving film. It has its flaws, but it will leave you thinking for a while after it's over. See it if you can!7.8/10

"Children of lesser god" is an unique movie. It was the first film directed by a woman (Randa Haines) to be Oscar nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Marlee Matlin is the youngest ever winner of a Best Actress Oscar. Matlin is also one of only four actresses to win the Best Actress Oscar for a debut film performance. The movie is one if the few movies about people with hearing problems and deafness. The film was the first major motion picture since the 1926 silent film You'd Be Surprised to cast a deaf / hearing impaired actor in a major role. Marlee Matlin has only one spoken line in English during the entire film. The rest of her performance is in American Sign Language.The movie is based on critically acclaimed Broadway stage play that was very popular. The playwright Mark Medoff also wrote the screenplay for this movie. The film and source play's "Children of a Lesser God" title is derived from the twelfth chapter of Alfred Lord Tennysons "Idylls of the King" cycle of twelve narrative poems.The screenplay is both simple and complex. Hollywood is full of love stories where there isn't really no humor and the drama feels forced. Here it all feels real. It feels like real life. The characters are well written and the conflicts the face are completely natural and believable. It's interesting that the movie starts like one of those movies about inspiring teacher , but slowly turns into wonderful melodrama. There are many scenes involving Hurt's work with the deaf children and they are good , but it's the love story that counts the most. The screenplay rightfully deserved the Oscar nominee.The chemistry between Hurt and Matlin is brilliant. It's not strange , because they really felt in love with each other while making "COLG". They even lived together for few months after movie was finished and it's a sad thing that it didn't last. When you watch the movie you can see perhaps the most authentic romance I've ever seen in cinema.Marlee Matlin is spectacular in here. You could say it's a kind of cheat for deaf person to play def person. It doesn't change the fact that she is wonderful . I've never thought that a sound of hand clapping other hand might be chilling (watch the movie – you will know what scene I'm talking about). Matlin is able to say so much with her hands or face . The only time she speaks it's truly heartbreaking.William Hurt is in the shadow of Matlin , since he got the less interesting role. Still , he is great. He always was a master of subtlety and this movie is no exception. His character also changes and suffers during the movie. His also one of the best inspirational teachers in history of cinema.Piper Laurie has not too much screen time , but beautifully makes a complex character of Sarah's mother. In hands of less skilled actress it would be a cliché character and trivial performance . Laurie gives the audience a character who isn't black or white and quite possible the one they could relate to the most.The movie is very well directed by Randa Haines , which is surprising since it's her movie debut. Yet she never allows the movie to be too sentimental or manipulative with the viewer's emotions. The mix of humor and drama is perfect. The movie is also quite well photographed, the beauty of New Brunswick coast makes you wanna go there.Some people are complaining that the movie is too noisy for a film about deafness , that there aren't any scenes that use silence. I don't really see a need for that. The use of sign language feels natural here. The subtitles would be distracting in my opinion. The movie does justice to deaf people portraying them as real people with ambitions , passions and desires , not like poor cripples.This is a beautiful movie about acceptance , finding yourself and emotional growth. This is what love should be. Find out if the world of sound and world of silence can meet. I give it 9/10.

So, this movie has been hailed, glorified, and carried to incredible heights. But in the end what is it really? Many of the ways in which it has been made to work for a hearing audience on the screen do not work. The fairly academic camera work keeps the signing obfuscated, and scenes that are in ASL are hard to follow as a result even for someone who is relatively fluent. The voice interpretation of Matlin's dialogue, under the excuse that Hurt's character "likes the sound of his voice", turns her more and more into a weird distant object as the film goes on. Matlin does shine in the few scenes where her signing is not partially hidden from view. But nonetheless, most of the movie, when this is a love story, is only showed from a single point of view, that of the man. As Ebert said, "If a story is about the battle of two people over the common ground on which they will communicate, it's not fair to make the whole movie on the terms of only one of them."The idea that an oralist teacher who uses methods that have been imposed in many deaf schools for decades would be presented as "revolutionary" is fairly insulting in itself. His character becomes weakened as a credible teacher as the movie goes on. Drawing comedy from a deaf accent is, quite honestly, rather low. And his attitude towards the male students of his class is pretty symptomatic of how he seems to act with women: as an entitled man. A party scene involving a number of deaf people including a few academics meeting together leaves him seemingly isolated, in a way that's fairly inconsistent with his credentials: I have seen interpreters spontaneously switch to asl between each other even when they weren't aware of a deaf person being in the area, and yet somehow he feels like a fish out of the water in an environment his education should have made him perfectly used to. As a lover, he seems like a typical dogged nice guy, including his tendency to act possessively afterwards. And yet the movie is, indeed, only really seen through him, as everything his lover says is filtered through his voice. The scenes involving the other deaf kids are, in general, wallbangers. The broken symbolism fails, the dance scene, the pool scene, even the initial sleep scene which is supposed to carry some of it - all these scenes that try to hint at the isolation of the deaf main character are broken metaphors, at best: many hearing people I know do dance on the bass beats that deaf people feel (instead of squirming like copulating chihuahuas), and going to take an evening dive for a hearing person is rarely an excuse to make a deep statement on the isolation of deafness (no, seriously, when I go swim, I go swim)...It also fails at carrying the end of the play, instead making it a story of a deaf woman who submits to a strong man. Even though the original play ended with a more equal ground, where both have to accept each other as they are, and where he has to finally recognize her real voice is the movement of her hands, not the vibrations in her throat.And for all the breakthrough that it may have seemed to be, Marlee Matlin remains Hollywood's token deaf woman to this day.