Devil’s Advocate is a rolling column that sees the world differently and argues for unpopular opinions of the day. This column, the writer acknowledges, can also be viewed as a race to get yourself cancelled. But like pineapple on pizza, he is willing to see the lighter side of it.
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In the lead up to the Academy Awards this year, I was looking forward to pretty much everything. I am not usually a big fan of elite indulgence but given the two years of the pandemic, we have just had a ceremony to somewhat wash over all the isolation felt welcome.
That is, however, in the context of the ceremony. What I was not looking forward to is worthy pathbreaking films being snubbed in exchange for charming but ultimately manipulative fare. But here we are in the aftermath of another Crash-like moment (2004) where CODA, a feel-good coming-of-age drama has taken home a wholly undeserved prize that might also become the unsustainable legacy of the film.
Let me first admit that of all the films I have watched over the last year, CODA moved me the most. But this response was always unidirectional built, like anticipation, on the crutches of a shrewd premise. A family of four, three of them deaf and the one who is not wants to learn singing. It is an incredulously convenient setup, designed to connive tears out of you. It is not a logline, but a newspaper headline that is then drawn out so people can find moments in which their knees and hearts buckle.
The beauty of it is that it is never deceptive, it is there in front of you all the time, and yet chokes you by simply manifesting. It is the same space that films like The Fault in Our Stars or Taare Zameen Par are born out of. A space that is aligned with everyday morality where sympathy precedes the sight of suffering. Where you break a little in anticipation and then some more when it is acted out for your eyes, and this case, of course, your ears.
I am obviously not trying to claim that I do not care for the deaf nor that films should not be made on the disabled or the diseased, but when disability becomes the structure of the story rather than the fulcrum on which the narrative might pivot, it becomes hard to both morally and politically resist being trapped by its lasso of sympathy. It is almost like the Ketto ads on YouTube that we always skip but not without a tinge of guilt. So how does one even say that CODA is an unworthy film, without seeming to disrespect the soft, well-meaning mushy core it is all about? Also, is the new parameter for cinematic achievement simply how much a film makes you cry? If so, then we have no issue.
In terms of pure cinematic achievement, there was not a better film in contention this year than Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog. For what it accomplishes, re-engineers, and reimagines in terms of genre, performance, and understated messaging, the Netflix film should have swept everything before it. And yet it was upstaged, rather stunningly by a formulaic, guilt-inducing film that casually drags the carpet from under your feet where you have been staring at it all the time. CODA is obviously empathetically made, and has a poise about it that most underdog films fail to embody but it has been structured so cunningly that it is impossible to not separate its craft from the weight of its subjects. Everyone’s on the inclusivity bandwagon of course, but whatever social messaging you want to cramp into your feature film, at least its emotional baggage should be earned rather than acquired.
It Is rather absurd really that not too long ago, Riz Ahmed gave perhaps the performance of a lifetime as a deafening drummer in Sound of Metal, a film that did not want to hug it out but was rather intent on illustrating the cataclysmic reality that disability brings with it.
Not to mention that if the brief, as ever, was inclusivity then The Power of the Dog was not exactly lacking.
CODA is the kind of film that creates its own wave by being utterly simple in its intent and execution. You know what is coming all along and yet you do not mind being manipulated into disowning the faculties that guide your cynicism. Even some poorly made films can, in places, touch or move you to tears but it takes a village to rewrite genre tropes and seed its landscape with an entirely new variety of crop. Apologies to Jane Campion and the entire cast of The Power of the Dog then for being disallowed that which really belonged to them.
The unfortunate aftermath of this minor catastrophe will be that CODA, like Crash, Argo, The King’s Speech before it, might be consigned to a legacy it most certainly did not deserve. It is a warm, satisfying film that is built on convenient, conniving structures meant to lean on you like the weight of the world before tacit, predictable sequences force you to crash under them. Of course, watching cinema is submitting to it on some level, and it is at times this manipulation that we go into the theatres for. But this concocted smoothie of guilt and sympathy cannot be taken for more value than craft that is trying to cajole an entire genre into yielding to a new form of telling. It is obscene, and time eventually catches up to such knee-jerk crowd-pleasing moments.
Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.
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