Captioned Print A Taming of the Shrew story with a different twist: the "shrew" is a deaf woman whose rebellion against received notions of disability, and the pain they will cause her, limits her more than the notions themselves. So Sarah Norman, fiercely aloof and a perennial "pain in the ass," must be tamed for her own good, and this may be the final sadness of Children of a Lesser God, a film that means to fight pity and sadness. Marlee Matlin, an actress who is hearing impaired, gives a performance of rare intensity as Sarah, a bright woman who has chosen to become a custodian in the school for the deaf she attended from childhood rather than face the myriad challenges of integrating with the hearing world. She has her own reasons; Matlin holds those reasons close to the chest, revealing them gradually, reluctantly, powerfully. (Her performance is a gesture against the screenplay that saddles Sarah with a heavy stereotype for deaf or blind women: the sexual victim/vamp). James Leeds (William Hurt), a language teacher in love with Sarah, attempts to draw her out of, and sometimes penetrate, her silent world and is continually rebuffed for his clumsiness: Sarah's claim that deafness is "not the opposite of hearing but a silence full of sound" challenges him to meet her on her own terms. But all good shrews must come to an end; the film is a search, often moving and intelligent, sometimes clumsy, for a common language for these lovers. (Nevertheless the director has Hurt painstakingly verbalizing Matlin's dialogue, presumably for the benefit of hearing audiences for whom the film was clearly designed; while a few prints were subtitled for hearing-impaired viewers, subtitles for both languages would have given Matlin's dramatically skilled signing the dignity it deserves and saved Hurt from the narrative abyss at the same time.)