CODA
Between a family who cannot hear and a daughter who sings, music arrives before words.
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
The people behind it ⏳🌊
- ComposerMarius de Vries
Drawing on experience gained on La La Land and Moulin Rouge!, he led the film's music on the principle of preserving the actors' real voices.
- DirectorSiân Heder
Transposing the French film La Famille Bélier to a Massachusetts fishing town, she wrote and directed the film and won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for its script.
- LeadEmilia Jones
Cast as Ruby, she sang every song herself, learning sign language and singing together for the role.
- LeadTroy Kotsur
Playing the father, Frank, he became the first deaf actor to win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for this film.
- Lead castMarlee Matlin
She plays Jackie, the mother, and had already won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1986 for “Children of a Lesser God.”
I. The film, its music, and Marius de Vries
(Source) CODA is director Sian Heder's rewriting of the 2014 French film “La Famille Bélier,” transplanted to a Massachusetts fishing town. It tells the story of Ruby, the only hearing member of a family with deaf parents and an older brother, as she discovers a gift for singing. It premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, and Apple took on distribution, releasing it through streaming. (Composer) The music was entrusted to Marius de Vries. He served as executive music producer on La La Land, and on works such as Moulin Rouge! he has also worked as a vocal producer, shaping actors' singing to a level fit for the stage. Heder had set herself the principle of using the actors' real voices as they were, and she called on de Vries as the person to uphold it. (His role) On this film, he was as much a vocal coach, accompanying actress Emilia Jones through the months she spent learning to sing, as he was a writer of the score. The decision to finish the film with real voices and no dubbing was the first principle on which its music rested. (The place of music) In CODA, song is not ornament. It is the only measure of the distance between those who hear and those who cannot, and the only bridge that narrows that distance. The chapters that follow trace how that bridge is built.
II. Opening - a house where sound divides
(Setting) Gloucester, Massachusetts, where a small fishing boat handed down through generations is the family's livelihood. The father, Frank, the mother, Jackie, and the older brother, Leo, are all deaf; only the daughter, Ruby, can hear. (Role) After helping with the dawn catch, Ruby interprets for her father with buyers and government offices before school. To her family she is a daughter and, at the same time, their only ears. (Trigger) Hearing that Miles, her secret crush, is joining the choir, Ruby signs up for choir class too, without much thought. (Discovery) The music teacher, Bernardo Villalobos — Mr. V, as the students call him — hears something in Ruby when she first lifts her voice that sets her apart from the other students. From this scene on, the story begins to flow along two currents: the family trade and song.
III. Development - training the voice
(Apprenticeship) Mr. V offers private lessons after school. For the first time, Ruby faces music not as homework but as something of her own. (Duet) For the school concert, he assigns Ruby and Miles a duet. In the rehearsal room, the two learn how to start from different places and meet in the same melody. (Pressure) At the same time, new regulations requiring boats to carry fishing monitors drive up costs and shake the family business. Ruby is called away to negotiations more and more often. (Rift) The more time she gives to singing, the more time she spends away from the boat. No one says it aloud, but everyone senses that the moment is approaching when Ruby must choose between her family and the stage.
The duet practice Mr. V assigns, the passage in which Ruby and Miles slowly grow closer.
- The call-and-response structure of the original Motown duet (Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell, 1968) naturally mirrors the relationship between the two.
- The way the parts are divided lets us hear the basic principle of a duet: starting from different places and meeting in the same melody.
- The voice-centered, unaccompanied arrangement tells us in sound that this is still rehearsal, not yet performance.
- In this scene it sounds like a simple coming-of-age tale, but the same song returns later with an entirely different weight.
IV. Turn - the night of the concert
(The audience) On the night of the school concert, the family goes together to see Ruby perform. (Performance) After an opening sung by the full choir, Ruby and Miles's duet begins. Seated in the audience, the family can only guess at the mood from the applause and the expressions on people's faces. (Staging silence) Here the film lowers and then cuts the sound, letting the audience briefly hear the daughter's song from Frank's seat. It is a moment that makes us feel the distance between two worlds without a single line of dialogue. (Homecoming) In the car on the way home, Frank's expression has changed. He wears the face of a man who has realized, for the first time, that he has never truly heard his daughter sing.
The film's original song, sung by Emilia Jones, heard over the end credits.
- Its unassuming lyrics, turned toward the town and the sea, widen the emotional reach of the fishing-town setting.
- Because it was written new for this film rather than covered, we hear a melody built from scratch to fit the feeling of the drama.
- It plays over the credits after the film ends, carrying the story's afterglow in Ruby's voice.
V. Climax 1 - a father's hands
(Request) Late that night, Frank calls his daughter over and asks her to sing again. This time there is no stage — only the yard of their house, and no audience. (Method) He places his hand on his daughter's throat. His way of hearing song through vibration creates the quietest and most resounding scene in the film. (Song choice) The song Ruby chooses is Joni Mitchell's “Both Sides, Now.” A song by someone who has seen clouds, love, and life from both sides is no different from the story of Ruby herself, standing between two worlds. (Resolve) After this scene, Ruby decides to try out for the Berklee College of Music. No one in the family can readily agree, but Frank alone wears a different expression.
The pivotal wordless scene in which a father lays his hand on his daughter's throat and hears her song through vibration.
- Joni Mitchell's original is famous for lyrics that look at clouds, love, and life from both sides, and it overlaps exactly with Ruby's place between two worlds.
- The arrangement, with accompaniment pared to a minimum and the voice laid bare, sounds like a choice to use the song as a means of communication rather than of technique.
- The resonance of this passage grew once it became known that Emilia Jones sang every song, this scene included, herself, without dubbing.
- The gesture of placing a hand on the throat to hear song through vibration is said to be drawn from the real experience of the Deaf community.
VI. Climax 2 - Boston, the audition
(Setting) The audition hall at Berklee College of Music in Boston. Ruby decides to sing the same song once more. (Change) This time she adds sign language to her singing. A song first sung toward the judges turns into a song for her family, who have arrived late at the back of the hall. (Reprise) The technique of silence used at the concert returns in this scene. The choice to use the same device twice is no accident — but what this silence means is best discovered on screen, the surest way to meet this story whole. (Weight) The judges' faces, the family's signing, the stillness after the song ends — the entire film hangs on this one short scene.
VII. Afterglow - the morning of leaving
(Farewell) In the final scene, as the family sees her off in front of the house and her friend Gertie drives Ruby to Boston, hands speak before words do. (Stillness) To the very end, the film never abandons its restraint with sound. Instead of a rousing closing number, it ends by leaving space, just as this family has always lived. (Lineage) De Vries continued his film-music work after this picture. (Place) CODA is remembered as the first film from a streaming service to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, and as the year a deaf actor first won Best Supporting Actor. At the heart of all these achievements was music that changed the way sound is handled.
Lesser-known stories
Behind de Vries's involvement in CODA lies the career he built as executive music producer on La La Land. Yet the two works sit at opposite ends of scale. If La La Land was completed with a full orchestra and dazzling choreography, CODA is made mostly of moments that rest on a single unaccompanied voice. That one person moved between two such different scales is hard to see unless you look closely at his filmography. The staging that lowers the sound in the concert scene is said to have been refined by director Sian Heder together with the production team. Heder has said in several interviews that the scene had to reach deaf and hearing audiences with equal weight. This adjustment, aimed at both audiences, is counted as the reason the scene is not consumed as mere technique but is still talked about long after. There is a reason bass-heavy music is used so often in the film's party scenes. Within the Deaf community, the experience of enjoying music by feeling low vibrations through the body is real, and following rhythm by resting a hand on a speaker or through the resonance of the floor is a culture that has been described in many accounts. Few know that these scenes, which may feel unfamiliar to hearing audiences, are in fact among the film's most truthful moments.
Glossary notes 📚🔎
Diegetic music (in-story music)
The word diegetic comes from the Greek diegesis, meaning the world being narrated. The name itself already holds its meaning: whether the characters within the story can hear the sound. Music the characters themselves can hear is called diegetic music, while background music that only the audience hears, and the characters cannot, is called non-diegetic music. When someone plays a song over a speaker in the classroom and all the classmates hear it together, that is diegetic; the background music laid under a tense scene, which the characters cannot hear, is non-diegetic. In CODA, diegetic music the characters also hear, such as the choir's songs, is used in clear distinction from background music heard only by the audience.
Underscore
Underscore carries the literal meaning of the English word: to draw a line beneath. It means adding sound laid beneath the image, as if underlining the emotion of a scene. It refers to background music that runs quietly beneath dialogue or a scene. It is like the gentle music flowing under the teacher's explanation in a warm-up video in gym class — you would still understand the content if the music disappeared, but with it, the mood changes. The same word is used for the underline symbol '_' in writing or code.
Sound design
It is the work of designing which sounds go into a scene and which are left out, and how loud or soft they should be. When films or games deliberately imitate the way surrounding sound turns muffled when you put your face underwater in a swimming pool, that too is sound design. It is exactly the method CODA uses to express the point of view of its deaf characters.
Reprise
Reprise comes from the French word reprise, meaning "to take up again." The name says exactly what it is: picking up once more a song that has already passed by. It refers to singing, later in a work, a song heard earlier, now in a different context or with a different feeling. Think of the cheer song sung at the start of a school sports day: sung again after the final event, in tired and overflowing voices, it feels entirely different. In CODA, the same song is used twice to show how far a character's heart has grown.
Cover
A cover is a new performance, sung or played in one's own way, of a song someone else has already released. When a class at a school festival rearranges a popular hit in its own style and sings it, that is a cover. CODA brings in well-known older songs as covers, giving new meaning to its characters' situations. The word "cover" is also used in insurance to mean providing protection, and in the news to mean reporting on a story.
Leitmotif (guiding motive)
Leitmotif means "leading" (Leit) "motive" (motiv) in German. The name itself holds the idea of a short melody that keeps following and guiding a particular character or emotion. It is a technique in which the same short melody appears whenever a certain character or situation comes on, so that the audience knows what to call to mind from the melody alone. It is a bit like a group project where the team chimes in with the same short cheer every time a particular friend presents. In CODA, a Joni Mitchell song plays a similar role, used twice as a melody that binds father and daughter.