Soooooo he really wasn't deaf/mute was he? Towards the end he tells the others that the mother wants to go back to Sicily. What was up with that? Was he just pretending to be deaf/mute or was this part of the "magical realism" of the film?
shareNo. The previous scene you see the grandmother and the mute boy together you see her touching him and they look intencly at eachothers.
After that she doesn't say a word, but the mute boy speaks for her. Which could be given that she gave her own voice to him, so that he could stay in USA. She herself wanted to go back to Italy, so it wasn't as important for her to be able to speak.
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They blew up Congress!!! HAHAHA!
Why the "No" at the begining of your post? Literally giving someone your voice isn't magical realism?
Call me Ishmael...
In the beginning of the movie it's shown that he can hear because the man in back shouts "turn left" and the "deaf mute" who is leading the trio immediately veers to the left.
shareI don't understand why so many of the comments about this movie don't seem to have grasped that the boy was NEVER DEAF. You can see that in the opening scenes with him and his brothers, even though it refers to him as deaf/mute.
Apparently they believed he was actually mute, however.
How he comes to speak at the end may be that he just never chose to speak before, OR that his grandmother with her special powers was able to give him that gift. In the scene with the two of them, gazing into each other's eyes, maybe she's telling him she is going to do this. He keeps shaking his head, but she nods tenderly.
That's correct; he was never deaf. Early on, when two young women (the tag-along brides) said something like, "Oh, he's the deaf boy", he clearly heard them, grimaced, and put his snail-laden head down. They were incorrect, but he had no voice with which to efficiently express himself.
The family believed him to be mute, whether the supposed disability was by choice or not. It's cool how he finds his voice in the end, whether of his own accord or by a healing transformation via his grandmother.
"Don't get chumpatized!" - The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007)
His father understood. He told the Americans "He's just stubborn."
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