Listen to Your Heart Film Critique

Film Critique/ Analysis #4

Michael Atkinson

Cinema 28

Of Mothers, Cancer, and Being Deaf

Coming across this film by randomly scrolling through Netflix one day, I decided to watch it - and this was an hour and forty minutes of my life that I will never get back. Listen to Your Heart (2010) is an interesting film about love at first sight, being deaf, controlling mothers, striving for your dreams and cancer all rolled into one. How is it even possible for a filmmaker to make a film about so many things? Well, there is a reason filmmakers don’t. 

The audience first meets Danny - a likable, flawless, 24 year old male who wants to make music and record a demo. But when he meets Ariana, he falls in love at first sight. The problem? She’s deaf. So it seems like a good plot: a musician falling in love with a deaf girl who can’t hear his music. However, her being deaf isn’t a problem for this couple. Danny still falls in love with her, despite his friend, Roger’s, protests about how she won’t be able to give him everything in a relationship. Despite not knowing sign language, in one montage scene, Danny is fluent at it and their relationship is flourishing. However, it’s Ariana’s mother who is the problem. She is unsupportive of Ariana getting close with someone since she, in effect, controls Ariana’s life. 

Here is where the story moves away from Danny, and Ariana becomes the main character as one can tell that the director - Matt Thompson - wanted her to be all along. Ariana is the character who does the growing and changing, learning to take her life back from her mother; whereas Danny neither changes nor grows nor learns anything. He is simply a lovable and flawless main character from the beginning to the end. The plot continues to grow and twist as the scenes change rapidly, with new problems arising and new characters popping up all over the place that really have nothing to do with original plot.

But aside from the ever-changing plot line, it is also the acting that seems to be a turn off. Roger plays the stereotypical “black guy” of the film, more obsessed with looks and sports than looking beneath the surface for something more - and he has a bad habit of saying, “bro” at the end of each sentence. All of his conversations with Danny are completely overacted making it seem like it’s a scene straight from some school video on why we should say no to drugs. It seems that Danny, played by Kent Moran, is the only one with real acting ability. Even Alexia Rasmaussen, who plays Ariana, wasn’t even deaf. Maybe it’s just that I have some more knowledge on deaf culture, but having a hearing person play a deaf person is a complete insult to the deaf community. 

In an interview with Moran, a few deaf individuals asked why a hearing person played a deaf role and his response was, “The movie used to be longer and had different twists that required a hearing actress, and we thought that this role was a good challenge for an actress to show her abilities.” From that statement, the deaf community was outraged since he is stating that deaf people cannot do everything that a hearing person could do. And this contradicts everything that the message of the film was supposed to bring out.

After some more stereotypes about deaf people, Danny and Ariana’s relationship being torn apart by her mother, an interpreter violating the code of ethics, a setup date trying to sexually assault Ariana, Roger turning supportive of their relationship, Ariana wanting a cochlear implant and wanting to go to a music school, Danny holding a concert for his music, his boss being a drunk, and Ariana getting a best friend who then sneaks her out of the house, Danny finally gets cancer. It seems like all plot goes up into the air at that point and it becomes anyone’s game. And really, I still don’t even know why it’s called “Listen to Your Heart.”