CODA: A Heartwarming, Great Movie! (Apple TV+)

"CODA" is an AAW film and, so far, my favorite movie of 2021!  It won the Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award, and it's a MUST-SEE!  The movie is adapted from the French film "La Famille Belier."  The acting is a tour-de-force by Emilia Jones, who has a great voice, handles a very complex emotional role with ease, and even learned sign language for the part!  Jones deserves an AA nomination, and I expect her to be nominated.  She plays Ruby Rossi, a high school senior who loves to sing and has an amazing voice. A "Coda" is a music term meaning "the concluding passage of a piece of music."  I thought the film's title was a metaphor for Ruby's journey in the movie, but it also is an acronym: Child Of Deaf Adult. Ruby is the only talking/hearing person in her family.  Her parents, Jackie (Marlee Matlin) and Frank (Troy Kotsur), as well as her brother, Leo (Daniel Durant), are all deaf.  (In fact, the actors playing these parts are deaf in real life, too!)  Her father earns his living as a fisherman.  Ruby and Leo help their dad out on the boat – Ruby gets up at 3 am to do this before she goes to school.  Times are tough and the family is just scraping by. At school, Ruby joins the choir and the music teacher, Bernardo Villalobos (Eugenio Derbez), soon realizes that he has an exceptional talent on his hands.  He pairs her with Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) to do a duet at the Christmas concert, but he also offers to coach Ruby and get her an audition at the Berklee School of Music, with even the possibility of a scholarship!  The coaching stretches Ruby's ability to handle all her responsibilities.  She feels guilty about possibly abandoning the family – Ruby doesn't think the family could make it without her, since she is their link to the outside world, serving as their sole interpreter.  Making the situation even more difficult: her family, being deaf, doesn't even "get" music. Ruby is conflicted between pursuing her dreams and her family responsibilities as well as needing to overcome performance anxiety caused by bullying when she was in elementary school.  She also starts having romantic feelings for Miles. Writer/Director Sian Heder ("Orange Is The New Black") is a rising star, and I look forward to her next TV series or film.  "CODA" is just the "beginning" for Heder and Jones.  Plus, the movie has a great soundtrack too!