The Quiet
Directed by Jamie Babbit
Poor, fetching Elisha Cuthbert gets so much audience flack on TV’s “24” as Kim Bauer, a magnet for implausible catastrophes and an insufferable daddy’s girl. In what seems a retaliation and/or self-parody, Cuthbert cranks up the Electra complex to its most dangerous extreme in The Quiet, overripe in a Barbie wig, cheerleader outfit and heels. Here, the violence isn’t global but suburban, portrayed with similarly repugnant shallowness. No heroic, bomb defusing fathers present, though.
Still, as Nina, a conflicted, vengeful Lolita in one overacted exchange after another, Cuthbert hijacks your gaze and complicity: wearing an electric-blue bra, she flattens a teddy bear with a hot iron; in a crowded high school cafeteria, she whispers a potty-mouthed confession. A pulp icon in the making, she’s the perfect ingredient in this messy hash of pop-art pretension and nasty Freudian noir that leaves a fatty, pungent taste in your mouth. The Quiet could be an unintentional camp classic if not for the grossly fetishized, controversy-baiting secret at its core. Actually, this erratically paced psychodrama hides another, deeper secret, an elaborate plot twist offensive only in its far-fetchedness.
The yin to Cuthbert’s alpha-blond yang is Camilla Belle as Dot—a brunette, androgynous deaf mute given to breathy inner-monologues that punctuate the shocking action with poetic asides. (Maybe her name should be Parenthesis?) As much as Dot prefers silence and invisibility, she can’t help but pick up on the atrocities around her; after all, if you could unload your ugliest sins to a supposedly deaf ear, wouldn’t you? This might be a more organic device if Dot’s inner voice didn’t yammer so much off-camera about Beethoven’s artistically prolific descent into deafness and other platitudes. She’s not an idiot, but she’s no savant either.
The Deer family has inexplicably taken Dot in following the sudden death of her father. Ignored or tortured at school by Nina, her best friend (a trash-talking, Amazonian Katy Mixon) and other Populars, she privately tastes her father’s ashes like Fun Dip. Her tabula-rasa face attracts the attention of a secretly-sensitive jock (Shawn Ashmore), who loves talking dirty to an unhearing, pretty face.
At her new home, Dot’s grief takes second billing to the escalating pathos of her foster family, who make the American Beauty brood seem well-adjusted. Playing another matriarch in toxic denial, Edie Falco is Olivia Deer, a frail pill-popper whose wide-eyed stupor provides for sporadic comic relief. (Did Carmela actually read the script before cashing her check?) A failed interior designer, she can’t get her own house in order, and it’s a hollow space shot like the murky, muffled bottom of a swimming pool. No wonder Olivia’s blue: once-sexy architect hubby Paul (Martin Donovan) is distracted, irritable and exhausted by heinous demons of his own.
This pair can’t even begin to control luscious, cranky Nina, who tries to ignore horrifying realities by bargaining as all teenagers do: for extended curfews, a new purse, sleepovers. Everyday inanities ultimately can’t curb Nina’s furious despair, which she vents to Dot, eventually plotting a desperate, bloody escape. Dot finally has no choice but to confront the evil she’d rather not see or hear. By the prom-night denouement—guns and piano wire, taffeta and smeared lipstick—Nina and Dot have merged as sister-avengers. This is an absurdly sordid B-movie that doesn’t follow its own whispered suggestions about moral responsibility and human empathy. Cuthbert’s a campy diversion, but her character is ultimately an exploited victim of brutality. Nothing fun or sexy about that.
