There’s a plethora of things to praise about Hallmark’s Sweet Nothing in My Ear, the film centering on a deaf mother and hearing father’s custody hearing, which aired last night on CBS.

And at first glance, it seems as if the pervasive controversy over whether the deaf child, Adam, played capably by the charming Noah Valencia, should receive a cochlear implant will overshadow all of those wonderful aspects of this film.

SPOILER ALERT!

Take, for example, the ways in which an ensemble cast portrays the deaf community with much more nuance and more accuracy than a film in which there is only one deaf character, often a victim.There’s the Deaf Pride activist grandpa, played by Ed Waterstreet, the conflicted deaf teacher and mother, played by Marlee Matlin, the cochlear-implanted deaf mother, played by Shoshannah Stern, the hard-of-hearing pyschologist who both signs and speaks, played by Deanne Bray. In my opinion, though, all were overshadowed by the voice-of-reason deaf grandma played by Phyllis Frelich. And, lest I forget, there was a gorgeous scene beginning the movie in which deaf kids and hearing parents alike collaborate in a deaf school production of “The Wizard of Oz.”

Or consider the ways in which the arguments over the cochlear implant reveal the emotional investment that people have in the issue. And the true gift of the way this film/play was written is that neither argument wins out decisively. Instead, we see that emotion clouds the judgment of each parent, concealing the truth that there is faulty logic in both arguments.

In one heated scene, Laura (Matlin) asks her husband Dan (Jeff Daniels, who studied signing for the role, and did quite well) something along the lines of, “What do I tell him, what do I say when he asks me why he wasn’t good enough the way he was, why we didn’t love him enough that we had to surgically alter him?!”

To which Dan shoots back, “What do I tell him when he asks me why I had a chance to help him hear, to help him have a better life, and I didn’t do anything?!”

To be sure, it’s a recipe for soap opera-worthy melodrama, layered on quite heavily throughout the film. Nonetheless, the subtlety with which the film tackles the the fragmentation of Dan and Laura’s relationship over politically-laden and personally-wraught conflicts is to be lauded.

While I wish we had more stories in the deaf literature and film canon centered somewhere else than on the pathology of hearing or on the “choice” to hear or speak, it’s important to acknowledge that the pervasiveness of this theme is about more than decibels and language decisions. It’s about the deaf community’s struggle for self-recognition, and about the hearing community’s campaign to maintain its’ systemic marginalizing practices without necessarily appearing ignorant.

At the turn of the century, Veditz’s film project to preserve sign language stemmed from the advent of the oral method, championed by people in agreement with A.G. Bell’s oral and eugenics policies. Later in the 20th century, technological advances and pervasive sim-com and SEE pedagogical practices continued to excite the deaf community’s anxiety that they weren’t being heard. And certainly, today’s heated discussions about people who support, choose, or live with a cochlear implant is a continuation of that tradition of anxiety over the deaf community’s continued lack of integration/recognition.

That’s why I like this movie so much. Though the cochlear implant is almost a character of its own, the film ends on a happy/sappy note as Laura and Dan realize that what’s best for Adam is for them to arrive at decisions like this together, rather than basing it on their own individual selfish desires. The last frame is of their intertwined hands, wedding bands prominent. Cue white middle-class heternormative hegemonic gooey-ness.

Yes, even technical and political liberties taken throughout the film can be forgiven, like the occasional tendency to cut a signing person’s hands out of the camera frame, or the tactic of voicing-over signed dialogue instead of subtitling it.

Certainly, we can explain that away over the anxiety hearing people (including the film producers? Oh, if only we could sit them down for coffee) have over the lack of sound when trying to access a story. And of course, sound played a central role, as shown when the soundtrack suddenly cut out whenever the camera switched to a deaf character’s viewpoint.

There’s one awesome scene during the custody hearing when a lawyer is interviewing one of the hearing grandparents, who has just finished saying that Adam knows she loves him. How, the lawyer asks? Befuddled for a split-second, she explains that her love is obviously apparent in her hugs and her facial expressions. But, the lawyer interjects again, how does he know what you mean “when you don’t even speak the same language?” Oh, snap!

I gotta admit that moment made me whip around, punch my partner in the shoulder, and say, “That, right there, would never happen in the cueing community!” So, clearly, we all come to this film with our own biases. Nonetheless, there’s a bunch of one-liners like this one that make this movie enjoyable. Another favorite is when Laura looks incredulously at Dan, and says, “He developed deafness, not cancer,” and walks away as if it were the stupidest conversation in the world.

The only extremely sour note, for me, was after the film had ended, and we didn’t know whether Adam would get an cochlear implant, and it didn’t really matter, because people in the story had learned more about each other and had grown from the experience. Kleenex and group-hug time, okay?

But then Hallmark plugged their magazine, and more emphatically, a story within entitled “Learning to Hear,” about a woman who’d gotten — you guessed it — a cochlear implant. The tagline?

After 47 years of near-silence, Stephanie Olson—like thousands of other deaf adults with a cochlear implant—cherishes the small daily miracles of a world with sound.

Talk about spoiling the moment and destroying the delicate balance the film had labored so hard to achieve. Sure, if you read the story, it’s not evil in and of itself. But plugging it right after the film draws the focus right back onto the cochlear implant and why someone should choose it, rather than on the human side of “Sweet Nothing” that transcends sound.

By the way, if you missed the film, no worries. The DVD version will be available in Hallmark Gold Crown Stores in May. Another classic deaf film with Ed Waterstreet and Phyllis Frelich, Love is Never Silent, will also be available there in June.

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