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Sundance Review: “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore”

Written by: Christopher Llewellyn Reed | February 4th, 2025

Shoshannah Stern, director of MARLEE MATLIN: NOT ALONE ANYMORE, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by David Carlson.

Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore (Shoshannah Stern, 2025) 4½ out of 5 stars

Marlee Matlin is both the only deaf actress to win an Oscar for Best Actress and also the youngest actress overall to claim the award. This was for the 1986 film Children of a Lesser God (CoaLG), directed by Randa Haines and based on the eponymous 1979 play. She was 21, and starred opposite William Hurt, 15 years her senior, with whom she began a relationship on set. Since he had won the Oscar the year before (for Kiss of the Spider Woman), and since the Academy has the winners of the opposite gender from the previous ceremony present to the new winners, he is the one who handed her the statuette. How sweet.

Perhaps not, for as we learn in Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, a new documentary from Shoshannah Stern (also an actress and also deaf)—making her directorial debut—Hurt was a controlling, abusive partner. May he rot in hell (he died in 2022). Fortunately for Matlin, and for the movie, there is a lot more to her biography than this disturbing fact. She is, as she always been, a deeply talented and pioneering figure, full of complexity and charm. The film is, too.

The title most literally comes from the fact that, with his win (for Best Supporting Actor) for CODA, Troy Kotsur became the second deaf performer to receive an Oscar. Which is where the movie starts, in Los Angeles at the 2022 Academy Awards. But there are additional meanings that the film explores, related to Matlin’s lifelong search for connection, a need born from an isolated childhood surrounded by family that either grieved her hearing loss or made few efforts to learn to communicate in sign language. Now 59, Matlin has a lot to be proud of, including the new family she built with husband Kevin Grandalski, a police officer she met in the early 1990s while filming the NBC series Reasonable Doubts.

Marlee Matlin in MARLEE MATLIN: NOT ALONE ANYMORE, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. Courtesy of Sundance Institute.

Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore is chock full of interviews with those who have known Matlin for much of her life, including her longtime interpreter Jack Jason, the actor Henry Winkler (who inspired her as a young girl and on whose property she married Grandalski), other deaf actors like Kotsur and Lauren Ridloff, CoaLG director Haines, screenwriter/director Aaron Sorkin (who put Matlin in his The West Wing series on NBC), and her siblings and children. All of it adds up to a comprehensive and warm portrait of the film’s subject, who emerges fully three-dimensional as a result. This is especially important given how often deaf folks are ignored.

A central question asked by Stern is why it is so difficult to find good representation of people and communities outside an ostensible norm. She wonders why the play version of CoaLG is still so often staged. Where are the more up-to-date and nuanced stories about the deaf? (CoaLG comes from the point of view of the hearing characters.) All one has to do is watch Matlin to understand the depths within her and agree that we all benefit from a world where everyone is included. Marlee Matlin is not alone anymore for yet another reason: she is seen in all her glory.

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Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.

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