Children of a Lesser God

Don't expect the title to make sense

I first heard about Children of a Lesser God when I was watching a segment on TCM where the hosts were discussing movies that made them cry (which, for the record, is a typical Friday night for me). When Dave Karger said that the ending of Children of a Lesser God, when the two leads see each other across a dance floor, made him cry, I instantly looked it up. Apparently the title is a line from Shakespeare, and despite taking two classes entirely about Shakespeare, I can’t give you any more context than that. The title will remain forever a mystery to me, because I’m an adult now and no one can make me analyze Shakespeare passages and/or even glance at SparkNotes. That dance scene Dave Karger was talking about, however, has one of the absolute strangest, most incongruous, yet most delightful musical cues I’ve ever encountered and I did feel moved to give this film the kind of attention I never really gave Shakespeare. I’m sorry I went on a Shakespeare tangent here; I’m actually extremely neutral on him. Let’s talk about the movie!

So the premise of Children of a Lesser God is that William Hurt plays James, a new teacher at a school for deaf students. His job is to help the kids learn to read lips and speak, but he also spends a lot of time walking around their seaside New-England-but-actually-Canada town and wearing a variety of cozy outerwear while staring at the waves. It is constantly raining. This is all I ever want out of a film.

Here’s where I have to pause and say that, while I know this movie is problematic in at least one way that I’ll mention later, I have little experience with deaf culture and couldn’t tell you if this movie is in any way offensive in that regard. I do know that it cast hearing-impaired or deaf actors for the hearing-impaired or deaf roles, which seems to be somewhat unusual for the time. 

Anyway, James is doing his “I’m not a regular teacher, I’m a cool teacher” routine when he sees Sarah, played by Marlee Matlin, across a crowded cafeteria. She’s pissed off and throwing pots and pans at someone and he’s literally like, “Who is she?” Turns out she’s a former student who’s now a custodian at the school.

They have an instant attraction and proceed to spend the entire movie falling in love and being mad at each other. Seriously, these characters are rarely happy together. Their biggest conflict is that Sarah has always refused to speak or read lips, and James will not leave her alone about it. Like, it’s a constant “Hey, maybe just say one thing?” with him. William Hurt is an amazing actor, but he also projects such a barely contained anger (that in this movie is sometimes not contained) that it’s hard not to cringe when he begs her to do the one thing she’s always said she won’t do. Sarah is angry and sometimes cruel to him, but clearly very vulnerable and hurt. It’s easy to see why Marlee Matlin won a best actress Oscar for this role—she imbues Sarah with so much pain and longing. James obviously loves her but wants something that a life with her will never give him. These two people are, frankly, not suited for each other at all! In fact, their climactic fight is almost unbearably awful, a shouting match that never devolves into physical violence but threatens to at any moment. Yes, we’re led to believe that they both learn and grow from each other and come back together as their better, more evolved selves, but I’ll just say that if this was a book, the Goodreads reviews would be abysmal. There would be so many disgusted GIFs. A lot of DNFs. You get the picture. 

So you might be asking…Kerry, why are you recommending this romance that isn’t romantic? 

Well. I just love it, okay? It might be easier for me to explain a few of its selling points, some of which are just scenes that I can’t stop thinking about. Here goes: 

-At one point, Sarah is swimming naked in the school’s indoor pool after hours, which must be her primary form of exercise because she’s shown doing so at least twice. Maybe there aren’t any gyms nearby. I’m not judging. Anyway, James walks in when she’s in the pool and startles her, on account of a) she’s naked and b) presumably nude swimming in the school pool is against one or more rules. James apologizes and then starts to tell her that he’s falling in love with her. When he clocks her apprehension, he changes his sentence to “I’m falling in the pool with you!” and then flops into the water, fully clothed. And in this movie, “fully clothed” always means “wearing a trench coat.” They have their first kiss in the pool, in a scene that baffles me and my limited knowledge of buoyancy. Are they furiously treading water below the surface? I don’t know! I stalled out on the diving level of swimming lessons (which I failed three times), so perhaps the next level was Making Out in the Pool and I just missed out on some obvious tips. Then, in a move that’s even more confusing, Sarah removes James’s trench coat and they make out under water while surrounded by his floating clothing (remember, she’s already naked). It must be so hard to remove a trench coat when it’s wet. It made me think of that scene from Purple Rain where Prince tricked Apollonia into purifying herself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka and then raised an eyebrow and said  “that ain’t Lake Minnetonka” before driving off on his motorcycle as she attempted to tug her leather pants back on. Actually, that’s not really a related story so much as a scene I think about a lot. Sorry! 

-The music. Music is a huge part of this film, both in the conflict between James and Sarah (in a scene that manages to be both beautiful and ridiculous, he attempts to show her how Bach sounds) and in the relationships between every character. James teaches his students to perform a song called Boomerang in a very cute scene (his nerdy enthusiasm! His connection with the kids! The way he’s so excited when Sarah shows up and so confused and devastated when she leaves!).

And, of course, there’s that final scene I’ll get to later. But my favorite part is the score, which oscillates between slow, soaring strings and this jarring, discordant, very 80s synth music. It really sets the tone for this movie, which is “hmm, this is almost sweet, but wait, it’s not.”

-Okay, so let’s talk about the ending, the one that made TCM host Dave Karger cry. James and Sarah have broken up, at an impasse because neither is wiling or able to compromise. They have a fight that is, again, very bad and she leaves him after screaming her only speaking line of the movie in his face and dissolving into tears. He tries to find her by kind of stalking her (the 80s were really the pinnacle of stalking in movies) and eventually tracks her down, but decides not to bother her. They seem to have moved on. But then. There’s a dance at the school, and we see James walking through the crowd of students, making jokes with them and appreciating their progress as they dance to Jump (For My Love) by The Pointer Sisters. Wow, we think. James is a great teacher. Too bad he’s such an awful boyfriend, but oh well. 

BUT NO. This isn’t where the movie ends.

James stops. William Hurt’s elastic face morphs into a look of shock. Who could be standing there, on the other side of the dance floor, but…Sarah. Wearing a white dress, staring at him as Jump (For My Love) by the Pointer Sisters plays. William Hurt’s face transforms again into a near-tears expression of resignation and he attempts a tiny shrug, as if that’s all the movement he’s capable of, before turning and walking outside. 

Again, this all happens to the soundtrack of Jump (For My Love) by The Pointer Sisters. This is a rom-com ending, as if we’re going to forget the tortured romance these two have.

They have a conversation outside, both explain their points of view, and make up. You’ve seen a romance before; I don’t have to explain to you how this works. The Pointer Sisters are no longer playing and now it’s that discordant synth music. And then, it fades to black as the sound of waves crashing plays. 

It is, against all odds, incredibly moving. I didn’t cry, but I have watched it about five times and gotten chills. I love it. I love this movie. 

-At the beginning, I promised to touch on why this movie is problematic, and it’s actually for an incredibly upsetting reason. In her memoir, Marlee Matlin writes in great detail about the abuse she suffered from William Hurt when they were in a real-life relationship as this movie was filming. It’s difficult to read and certainly impacts the way I watch the film, as it’s almost impossible not to think about. And yet, I still love this movie. I still think William Hurt is a good actor, even if he wasn’t a good person. There are so many artists whose work I simply can’t enjoy after finding out about things they’ve done in real life (for starters, my favorite director and musician in high school were Woody Allen and Ryan Adams, respectively, and I’m not exactly eager to explore any of their work at this point in my life). However, I love this movie in spite of the sad story behind it, and I hope that my defense of this movie isn’t read as a defense of his actions. 

So as not to end on that note, I wanted to mention that Children of a Lesser God was nominated for five Oscars and won one (Marlee Matlin for best actress). Can you imagine a movie like this being nominated for an Oscar today? A slow-paced, moody, kind of sad romance? I attempted to watch all the Oscar nominees last year and gave up almost immediately because baby, it’s biopic town. Movies do not look like this anymore (but if you know of any that do, PLEASE tell me) and men don’t look like this anymore. In 1986, a dude could have a regular body in a film. Now, all men in movies are distractingly muscled, even in rom-coms where it doesn’t make sense. And don’t tell me my longing for the films of yesteryear is based in nostalgia, because I was an infant when this came out. Infants famously don’t enjoy moody romantic dramas. This has been an Old Person Rant with Kerry Winfrey. 

This is far too long and I’m really living up to the title of my newsletter right now, but I did want to say one more thing. Or, rather, I want to give you an assignment. This week, watch a movie that isn’t trending. One that isn’t being remade or rebooted or whatever. One that an algorithm doesn’t recommend to you. Maybe one that isn’t even streaming anywhere (personally, I love using the library for this. Not to be like, “hot tip, have you heard of the public library?” but I do find that some people forget they have movies). Delight in the feeling of no one tweeting about what you just experienced. It’s great, right? Just you and your thoughts. But then maybe you’ll have to start a newsletter so you can write 2,000 words (gulp) about a movie most people seem to have forgotten about. It’s a risk!

Next week, we’re going there. We’re diving in. We’re saying “laters, baby” to the 1980s and moving into the 2010s with a movie trilogy that launched Dakota Johnson’s career and was also a job for Jamie Dornan: it’s Fifty Shades of Grey, of course. Watching these movies has been a wild (helicopter) ride, one that’s not sexy in the least (I’ve seen more chemistry on many network sitcoms). I can’t wait to talk about it.