Actors in documentaries about their own lives rarely — perhaps never — speak with the kind of candor that Marlee Matlin brings to Shoshannah Stern’s new film “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore” (in theaters). This kind of project all too often results in a cagey puff piece, lots of warmed-over memories accented by one mildly surprising revelation, which ensures the movie will make headlines.
Not this film. From the start, Matlin speaks with an unvarnished frankness about the loneliness and prejudice she encountered when she burst into public consciousness in “Children of a Lesser God,” for which she won the best actress Oscar in 1987. For 35 years, she was the only deaf performer with an Academy Award — a record finally broken in 2022, when Troy Kotsur won for “CODA,” in which he co-starred with Matlin. Now, she says, she isn’t alone anymore.
But the path to this point was littered with frustrations in a world that still treats deaf people as second-class citizens. Matlin talks about how solitary she often felt, set apart not just from the hearing world but at times from the deaf one, too. She speaks, with nuance but also pain, of her relationship with her “Children of a Lesser God” co-star William Hurt, who was 16 years older and, she says, abusive at times. (Hurt died in 2022. In 2009, he issued a public apology “for any pain I caused.”) She also addresses the clear anti-deaf bias that surfaces in the news media — demonstrated, pointedly, by archival clips of interviewers saying offensive things — and how it shaped her addiction struggles as well as the way she presented herself in the years following her Oscar win.
The movie places Matlin’s stories in the context of wider issues for deaf people, including language deprivation, prejudice and exclusion from the hearing world. Some of that context comes from other interviewees, including Kotsur and the deaf actress Lauren Ridloff (“Eternals”). But the core of the film is Matlin. In becoming an accidental activist on behalf of deaf people, she has lived it all. She’s clearly developed the courage to speak out and is not afraid to use it.
Stern is also deaf and an actress, with an extensive career that includes roles on “Weeds,” “Jericho” and “Supernatural.” In directing this film, she made an unusual choice in how she shot her interviews with Matlin: They sit on a couch, facing one another, both often in frame. They use American Sign Language, subtitled for viewers who don’t know ASL, but with no vocal interpretation (in contrast, for instance, to the voice-over used in the recent documentary “Deaf President Now!”).
That means stretches of the film are nearly silent, and for hearing viewers that might at first feel odd. But of course it does: The movie business is built around sounds and voices. The hearing world is accustomed to being considered “normal.” In addition to telling this fascinating, devastating story, “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore” gives hearing viewers the experience of watching a film that’s intended for an audience with different capabilities, people who speak a different language. It’s as much about its form as its content; what it says is demonstrated by how it says it. The resulting film is engrossing — and it’s also profound.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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