’Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore’: Sundance Review

Dir: Shoshannah Stern. US. 2025. 97mins

It’s nearly 40 years since Marlee Matlin made Oscar historical past as the primary deaf Finest Actress winner. Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore charts her subsequent life as a trailblazer obliged to imagine the mantle of being a champion for the deaf neighborhood. Primarily based round illuminating interview periods, it touches on many points of Matlin’s skilled and private life, and will stay up for broad curiosity after its Sundance premiere.

On the floor, a stable, sweet-natured celebration of a novel artist, however it progressively gives a deeper perspective. 

Deaf actor Shoshannah Stern, recognized for roles in tv reveals Weeds, Jericho and Gray’s Anatomy, turns producer/director for Not Alone and is on digicam all through. Tucked into reverse corners of a voluminous couch, Stern and Matlin appear relaxed and really a lot relaxed as they converse in American Signal Language. Stern begins the movie as Matlin attends the 2022 Oscar ceremony, after which shifts again to 1985 with a few of the audition tapes and interview footage that helped her safe a breakthrough position as Sarah in Kids Of A Lesser God. Matlin’s profession got here full circle with the Oscar popularity of Sian Heder’s CODA (2021) and the Finest Supporting Actor Oscar win for her co-star Troy Kotsur. The truth that Matlin is now not the one deaf appearing Oscar-winner gives the documentary with its title and the arc to put her life in a wider context.

Stern provides Kids of A Lesser God appreciable prominence within the documentary, and rightly so. There are interviews with the movie’s director Randa Haines and people on whom it had a profound affect, together with deaf actor Lauren Ridloff and deaf actor and activist John Maucere. The movie and Matlin’s Oscar win thrust her into the limelight, and likewise ignited a love affair with co-star William Harm. She was 19 once they first met and he was 35. The connection was marked by home violence and substance abuse and casts recent mild on the evening of the 1987 Oscar ceremony. Because the earlier yr’s Finest Actor winner for Okayiss Of The Spiderwoman, Harm introduced the Finest Actress award to Matlin. She reveals that he was lower than thrilled by her victory and that she was petrified of what the implications is perhaps. 

On the floor, Not Alone Anymore is a stable, sweet-natured celebration of a novel artist, however it progressively gives a deeper perspective. Matlin recognises the naivety of her youthful self. The deaf neighborhood embraced her however there was outrage when she returned to current the Finest Actor Oscar to Michael Douglas in 1988 and ceased signing to talk the names of the nominees and winner. In restrospect, it’s clear that Hollywood was not prepared for Matlin. There have been few movie roles within the wake of her Oscar. It was tv that will ultimately present her with higher alternatives in Seinfeld, The West Wing, The Follow and past.

Not Alone permits Matlin to replicate on a life that has been marked by landmark achievements and private challenges from getting into rehab at one level (the primary deaf affected person on the Betty Ford Heart) to changing into a persuasive power within the adoption of closed captioning. It fills us in on the small print of her household life, her shut bond with loyal interpreter Jack Jason and prolonged friendship with actor Henry Winkler. Hindsight brings a reckoning with how little she was ready for the calls for that have been positioned upon her. The uplift within the movie comes from the place Matlin is now, as she turns 60 this yr and has accepted the recent problem of directing for the primary time. She is a radiant survivor of the very best and worst of instances.