'Deaf President Now!' Review
This crowd-pleasing documentary from Davis Guggenheim and Nyle DiMarco chronicles the weeklong effort in 1988 to finally have a Deaf person appointed as the head of a university for Deaf students.
Dubbing ASL rather than captioning signers in a documentary seems like the wrong choice, but it worked for Alex Gibney’s Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, and now it’s allowed and effective in Deaf President Now!, which is directed by Deaf actor-turned-filmmaker Nyle DiMarco and Oscar winner Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth). Like Mea Maxima Culpa, this film casts professional actors to give voice to the four core interviewees, with Captain America: Brave New World’s Tim Blake Nelson being the most recognizable.
From the start, I wondered how using captions for the sign language could have been just as successful while being more respectful. This is a visual medium, so I think it would have been fine, but historical documentaries as dynamic as Deaf President Now! require a lot of editing, and for a typical overlay of continued commentary as the film cuts to other visual material — likely archival footage — an audio element presumably plays better than a throughline of words on screen.
Deaf President Now! aims to be fast-paced and feel present in the moment of its storytelling. The film opens with a title stating that it “takes place” during one week in 1988, an unusual explanation for any documentary, let alone one that’s not entirely archival. But this statement emphasizes the tight timeframe of the titular protests at Gallaudet University, in which the all-Deaf student body rejected the latest appointment of yet another hearing candidate to lead the school. Demonstrations and the interruption of classes lasted from March 6 to March 13 and eventually garnered national media attention, resulting in the students’ demand being met.
Tim Rarus, Bridgetta Bourne-Firl, Jerry Covell, and Greg Hlibok were all significant participants in the protest, and all appear in the film collectively telling the whole story (and their personal stories) with great excitement and passion, their energy matched by the pace of the editing. The documentary calls to mind similar activism success stories such as Crip Camp and How to Survive a Plague, but while it’s just as rousing in its tone, it feels more involving as it immerses the audience in the urgency of that week and this cause.
Deaf President Now! gives an impression of being a powerful film in the way it so engagingly chronicles such a powerful achievement. As an inspiration to others in this time of need for fighters like Rarus, Bourne-Firl, Covell, and Hlibok, for related and unrelated goals, the documentary could live up to that impression. As a look back, it’s a thrilling depiction of deserving and determined heroes standing their ground and effecting change for something that should have seemed obviously their right to proper representation in leadership.
The film is also a triumph in its sound design, perhaps ironically. In various scenes, mostly those involving archival footage of crowds at the protests, the audio is dropped so that the audience experiences the moment as the students would have. It might only be appreciated by the hearing viewers, but it assists the documentary’s efforts to draw an empathetic response from them. Other instances of notable sound design include shots where the dubbed voices aren’t employed, as the filmmakers trust the audience to understand what’s being signed then. Even if one could question whether Deaf President Now! always makes the right choices, it’s filled with very smart ones.