2025 Sundance Film Festival - "Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore"

Marlee Matlin attends the premiere of “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore” during the Sundance Film Festival on Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025, at Eccles Theatre in Park City, Utah. Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP

PARK CITY, Utah – The moment Marlee Matlin stepped onstage at the 1987 Academy Awards as the first deaf actor to win an Oscar, for “Children of a Lesser God,” appeared to be a joyous triumph.

At 21, she rocketed to international fame and was given the immediate and often heavy mantle of deaf emissary, even as critics openly derided her “handicap” and labeled her Oscar win a “sympathy vote.” She became the one deaf actor everyone knows, making memorable appearances on shows like “The West Wing” and “Seinfeld,” but with far fewer opportunities than her Oscar ought to have provided. A loud voice in the fight to install a deaf president at the nation’s only deaf university. An activist fighting for a bill that would require every new TV to be enabled for closed captioning. (Like reading your “Severance” episodes? You have her to thank.)

But, as detailed in the new documentary, “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Thursday, context is everything.

In one of the film’s most breathtaking moments, which left audience members in tears, director Shoshannah Stern – also a deaf actress – plays back that easily YouTube-able acceptance speech from Matlin’s perspective.

She cuts out the sound. Cheers become inaudible. Applause becomes just moving hands. Matlin makes her way up the stairs in her lace lavender gown and jaunty headband and gets a peck on the lips from the previous year’s Oscar winner, William Hurt, also her co-star in “Children of a Lesser God,” with whom she says she had an intense, physically and emotionally abusive two-year relationship.

In split screen, Stern plays back the same ebullient footage we’d witnessed earlier in the film, as Matlin explains to Stern, in subtitled sign language, what was really happening. “I was afraid walking up the stairs …” she says. “I was afraid because I knew, in my gut, that he wasn’t that happy.” The look on his face chilled her. “That’s why I didn’t take the Oscar from him right away.”

Stern keeps the footage rolling, still muted, as emotions run across Matlin’s face, as she barely cracks a smile. “I wish it had been different,” the actress, now 59, explains. “I wish I had shown my joy. But I was afraid because he was standing right there.”

Matlin tells Stern she believes Hurt was threatened by her youth and her sudden success, getting an Oscar for her first film. (He’d also been nominated for an Oscar for their film that night but hadn’t won.) In Dave Karger’s recently released book “50 Oscar Nights,” she describes what he said to her in their limo home. “So you have that little man there next to you. What makes you think you deserve it?” she recalls.

Hurt died in 2022 at 71, and appears mostly in clips from “Children of a Lesser God,” in which he played a hearing teacher at a school for the deaf who falls in love with Matlin’s deaf janitor, but pushes to hear her speak. Matlin was 19 when they met, an unknown plucked from the Chicago theater scene, newly liberated from an isolating childhood home, and heavily using drugs (cocaine, marijuana and more). He was 35 and one of the biggest stars in the world, with a new Oscar for “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” and an alcoholic who was accused of violence by another former partner.

28th Annual SAG Awards - Show

Troy Kotsur, from left, Marlee Matlin, Emilia Jones, and Daniel Durant (and 3 ASL interpreters) introduce a clip from their film “Coda” at the 28th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards at the Barker Hangar on Feb. 27, 2022. AP Photo/Chris Pizzello

Stern’s documentary details Matlin’s lifetime of loneliness and isolation by parents wracked with guilt, Matlin says, for missing the illness that caused her to lose her hearing at 18 months, and within a hearing family who didn’t know how to accommodate her deafness. In both the film and her 2009 memoir, “I’ll Scream Later,” she reveals she was molested by a babysitter when she was 11 and by a high school teacher when she was 15.

On-screen, Matlin highlights how the othering of deafness made her more vulnerable. She’d never heard of domestic violence back when it was happening to her. “Hearing people are lucky that they can overhear and get information all around them,” she says. She had what Stern describes as “language deprivation,” isolated in her deafness from finding the words and concepts to help her grasp that what was happening to her was wrong.

She describes in the documentary being “thrown” in her first physical fight with Hurt and that evolving into “a habit of abuse.” In “I’ll Scream Later,” she describes a night when he attacked her while she was sleeping and raped her. (At the time of the book’s release, Hurt issued a statement that read, in part: “I did and do apologize for any pain I caused.”)

She does, however, give “an ounce of credit” to Hurt for going to rehab and showing her, by example, its benefits. She checked into the Betty Ford Center and left him when she returned.

And … she sought refuge at Henry Winkler’s Los Angeles home, she recounts in one of the movie’s most delightful passages, asking to crash for the weekend. “Two years later, she finally moved out!” says Winkler, laughing in the documentary. He and his family hosted Matlin’s 1993 wedding to police officer Kevin Grandalski in their backyard. The couple now have four adult children.

Back in his days of playing the Fonz, Winkler explains in the documentary, he went to Chicago to play an exhibition game with the “Happy Days” baseball team and took a local school up on an invitation to visit. There, a 12-year-old Matlin performed an impassioned interpretation of “What I Did For Love.” Afterward, her mother asked Winkler to tell Matlin how hard it is to be an actor, even if you can hear, and to encourage her to pursue something else.

“I said, ‘You got the wrong guy,’ ” Winkler says.

Later, Matlin tells him, “If we never met, I wouldn’t be here.”

On Thursday, for large swaths of the film, the 2,500-capacity Eccles Theater was practically silent, except for the sounds of hands slapping on hands as American Sign Language was spoken and lips mouthing words on-screen.

The documentary is a revolution of format. Stern often appears on-screen with Matlin, facing each other on a couch, having an open conversation about shared experiences, all in subtitled sign language. She’s also in the frame signing to deaf interviewees and hearing participants like Winkler, Aaron Sorkin and Matlin’s family members, who have an earpiece feeding them interpretation.

“I didn’t want Marlee to be alone on-screen. I wanted to be there with her,” Stern said in the post-screening Q&A, explaining why she put herself in the film so much. Both she and Matlin were greeted with a standing ovation, delivered with hands waving in the air, the ASL sign for applause.

Stern also says in the film’s press notes that she wanted to honor Matlin’s native language, to allow her and other deaf interviewees to express themselves freely and to give ASL a platform. (They also hired deaf translators to do the closed captioning.)

Awards Season 2022

Troy Kotsur, left, and Marlee Matlin in a scene from “CODA.” Apple TV+ via AP

The format is an embodiment of the film’s title, which is itself a reference to something an emotional Matlin said after Troy Kotsur won the Oscar for best supporting actor for “CODA” in 2022 — 35 years after she made Oscars history. “I’m not alone anymore,” she said, visibly falling apart on camera after all those high-pressure years of being the vanguard.

Stern explained onstage that she was one of the deaf performers whom Matlin inspired. When Matlin was asked to do this documentary for PBS American Masters and tapped Stern, with whom she’d acted before, as the director, Stern was at first intimidated. Then, she said, “I realized that her story has really been growing inside of me my whole life.” She’d been watching Matlin since she was a young girl, absorbing the praise she got, but also the dismissal and derision. She’d seen her have to explain deafness to hearing people again and again, educating the wider world rather than telling her own story. Stern wanted to give her that platform.

“All those years that I’ve done interviews, you probably saw them in the film, a lot of interviewers asked me the questions that were very — as best I can say — naive, not necessarily the most brilliant type of questions, and you can see my reactions, the way I looked at them,” Matlin told the Sundance crowd through her interpreter. She’d waited until her four kids were grown. “Now they’re adults (and) it was a good time to show them what Mom has gone through,” said Matlin. “I’m glad they’re here today to see this.”

The absence of oral speech throughout the film is the closest many audience members will get to understanding what it’s like to be deaf, to watch a movie without sound, while lacking the tools deaf people rely on every day, such as knowing sign language or reading lips. Instead, viewers must read fast-moving closed captioning — craning their necks to see around tall people in front of them, as a physical reminder of what it’s like to have to rely solely on your eyes for information. So much of the film is signed that when hearing people come on-screen, the sound of their voices is jarring, and almost unwelcome.

But what comes through, joyously and triumphantly, is that sound is not a measure of someone’s presence or what they have to say. Matlin is still learning and growing, she tells Stern, and wants to sign to her newborn granddaughter, because she always spoke out loud with her kids. In 2023, she directed deaf actors in an episode of the Fox TV show “Accused.”

Progress will come. When Stern hands her a Paramount publicity blurb from “Children of a Lesser God” describing her as “being lost in her own silent world,” Matlin laughs at how ridiculous that sounds.

“I’m very loud!” she says, signing – to which the theater burst out laughing. “And within myself, my mind is never silent.”

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