Children
of a Lesser God
1987
Director: Randa Haines
Starring: William Hurt, Marlee Matlin
Melodrama
usually isn’t my cup of tea. I tend to
go into a film with a very skeptical eye if it at all smacks of a Lifetime
Movie of the Week. From everything I had
heard of Children of a Lesser God, it was an elevated version of said
genre. I wish I could say that my
expectations were proven wrong, but nah, not really.
James
Leeds (Hurt) is a new teacher at school for the deaf. There he meets Sarah (Matlin), a former
student of the school who is now a janitor.
She is tremendously angry and refuses to learn to read lips or try to
talk. He is fascinated and pursues
her. They begin a turbulent love affair
that, both literally and symbolically, focuses on the issue of communication.
What
I liked, and what I thought Children of a Lesser God did pretty
well, was the portrayal of the prickly nature of relationships. Relationships aren’t easy sometimes, and
James and Sarah certainly know about that.
Theirs is a relationship typified by passion of both the angry and
romantic nature. James likes Sarah, but
he keeps trying to change her. She is
bound and determined to stick to sign language, and does not want to learn to
read lips or speak, but James, as someone who teaches deaf and hard of hearing
students to read lips and speak, can’t really understand this. He tells her several times that he’s sorry,
and he won’t try to change her, but then he just plain does it anyway. It’s like he can’t help himself. In the “Big Fight Scene” (oh come on, this is
a romance, you must have figured out there would be a “Big Fight Scene”), Sarah
accuses James of not allowing her to be an individual. She realizes that she has lost herself in the
relationship. Thank goodness for that
scene, because up until that point, that was exactly what I was thinking. Why on earth was James continually trying to
take charge and lead Sarah around? He
was making all these decisions for her rather than asking her. He was making changes that affected her life
FOR her. Thank goodness Sarah realized
it, because if she hadn’t, I would be writing a very different review right now,
one that would involve every synonym I could think of for “ridiculous.” She pulls away from him, from their
relationship, because she is such a strong character, she won’t allow that to
happen to herself. I liked that, and
Matlin does a great job with her performance.
