A dry cleaner's son in New Jersey has an offbeat meet-cute with a pretty girl: he's making a record of his singing voice in a phonograph booth while she's using a name-plate machine to put her name on a good luck charm (she runs off but conveniently leaves the charm behind, so that the singer will at least know her name the next time they have a meet-cute). Turns out the girl, a teacher at a school for the hearing impaired, is deaf herself, and her imperious mama doesn't want her hanging around with a would-be singer from Hoboken. Fraudulent 'feel good' romantic-drama from an almost intolerable genre: the handicapped love story. Arriving in theatres just two months after the slightly more-popular "Ice Castles" (in which a blind ice-skater made her dreams come true), "Voices" was written off as an also-ran. It doesn't really deserve a higher status, either, although Amy Irving has a plaintive beauty that is beguiling (her character is made to be too shy, however, with the eventual warm-up arriving too late). As her paramour, Michael Ontkean must enunciate his words so she can read his lips, but that doesn't excuse him shouting all his dialogue (which isn't worth deciphering, anyway, especially when he begins sentences with "Listen..."). Alex Rocco, Herbert Berghof and Barry Miller are a lively bunch as Ontkean's combative family, but the romance between the young lovers fails to bloom. As such, the happily-ever-after finale feels like quite a stretch, indeed. *1/2 from ****
