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| Paramount Pictures | Release Date: October 3, 1986 |
Starring:
Allison Gompf, Frank Carter Jr., Georgia Ann Cline, John F. Cleary, Marlee Matlin, Philip Bosco, Philip Holmes, Piper Laurie, William D. Byrd, William Hurt
Summary:
A new speech teacher (William Hurt) at a school for the deaf falls in love with the janitor, a deaf woman (Marlee Matlin) speechless by choice.
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In terms of human understanding, the film is worth dozens of documentaries on deafness. [10 Dec 1986]
Matlin's performance in her first major role in her first movie is so good -- sensitive, sharp, funny -- that she's likely to be the first deaf actress to get an Oscar nomination. [20 Oct 1986, p.77]
[Matlin] has an unusual talent for concentrating her emotions--and an audience's--in her signing. But there is something more here, an ironic intelligence, a fierce but not distancing wit, that the movies, with their famous ability to photograph thought, discover in very few performances. Children of a Lesser God, though given a handsome openness in Director Haines' production, cannot transcend the banalities of the play. But Matlin does. She is, one might say, a miracle worker.
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Their relationship is both a genuinely touching love story and a clever gloss on the barriers and extensions of language. It also contains a truly didactic other-dimension which points out some very salutary things about our often unintentional slights towards the deaf, without being either a simple sob or an issue story.
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Something happened to Mark Medoff's moving Children of a Lesser God in its translation from stage to screen: Somebody turned it into a soft-focus Hallmark card about deaf people. [3 Oct 1986, p.D1]
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