“Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore” doesn’t explicitly mention Judaism, but it is present in the background in numerous ways: a scene from her Jewish wedding, her father donning a kippah, the smashing of the glass under the chuppah in Henry Winkler’s yard.
The actress has never shied away from her Jewish identity, but in this movie, she really hones in on the challenges and the joy of being a Deaf Hollywood trailblazer. It’s one of the most candid, intimate and illuminating portraits of a star I’ve ever seen.
I first fell in love with Marlee Matlin watching her in “Children of a Lesser God.” That 1986 film was based on a play, and Matlin plays a defiant young Deaf woman who refuses to speak. While the romance in the story left me with an uncomfortable feeling, Matlin herself embodied the spirit of someone who felt like a misfit, wronged by the world, so well that I felt it in my bones. I have not wanted to miss a Marlee Matlin project since.
I loved her in “The L Word,” adored her in “Switched at Birth,” had an existential crisis with her in “What the Bleep Do We Know!?” and cried through “CODA.”
“Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore” is no less of an emotional experience than any of these films. Directed by Shoshannah Stern, a Jewish Deaf actress, director and trailblazer herself, the movie has a lovely sense of intimacy.
In some scenes we see Matlin and Stern sitting on a couch, Matlin’s colorful socked feet in the frame, speaking candidly as any two true girlfriends can.
They talk about Matlin’s painful and abusive relationship with William Hurt, her “Children of a Lesser God” co-star, the relatable to many Deaf people of feeling left out in a hearing family, and also the way Marlee has cheered on — but also sometimes drawn the ire of — the Deaf community over the course of her career. They specifically mentioned when she spoke at the 1988 Oscars, and read out the names of the nominees instead of signing them.
The documentary also shows how the unlikely support of a famous Jewish star helped Matlin pursue her dream. Yes, I’m talking about Henry Winkler.
Matlin was a big fan of his performance on “Happy Days” with Deaf actress Linda Bove, and when he came to see a performance of the ICODA children’s theater where Matlin acted in the suburbs of Chicago, she did her best to wow him. Her mother, Libby, approached Winkler after the show and asked him to tell her daughter how hard it is to be an actress, even when you are hearing, and to dissuade her from her dream — but Winkler told her that she had the wrong person, and became Matlin’s cheerleader instead.
Without that support, Matlin muses in a conversation in the documentary, she doesn’t think she would have her career, but Winkler disagrees. What is also true is that Winkler and his family became her surrogate family as she was picking up the pieces of her life after breaking up with Hurt. It’s why she married her husband, Kevin Grandalski, in their backyard; the place was her “home away from home.”
I know it sometimes seems cheesy to talk about the idea of tikkun olam, the Jewish concept of fixing the world, but it is very much imbued in this documentary. We see how Matlin changed things for Deaf actors, as the first one to have a role that big, that memorable, that accolade-earning, and how she used that leverage to make movies and TV more accessible for other Deaf actors.
She advocated for closed captioning, she refused to back down when executives wanted to cast a hearing actor in “CODA” to play her husband (a role that ended up winning Troy Kotsur only the second Academy Award a Deaf person has ever gotten for an acting role, after Matlin’s 1987 win). She consistently opens doors for other Deaf actors and has spent her entire career really embodying the concept of tikkun olam.
The movie itself also feels like a path to justice, because Stern is a Deaf creator making a movie with her community in mind. The viewer feels that intention so much in the way the movie is shot and framed. There is no catering to a hearing audience here; when actors sign, we hear the true auditory experience of a Deaf conversation, and close captioning helps remind hearing viewers of all the things that Deaf people might miss in their experience of a movie catered to the hearing.
This documentary brings forth the story of a magnificent, complicated Jewish woman. It is well worth your time.
“Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore” is now streaming on PBS.
