This is another one of those movies that's all about how life in suburban America isn't as perfect as it seems, with cruelty and brutality and degeneracy seething under its placid surface. There must be a lot of filmmakers who had awful suburban childhoods because they keep making this same story over and over again, even though it ceased to original or shocking when Knot's Landing debuted on TV back in the 1980s. They can still occasionally make a good one, like American Beauty. The Quiet, however, is a fairly lifeless entry into the genre.
Dot (Camilla Belle) is a teenage girl whose parents are dead and has ended up in the custody of her godparents. This suburban family has all the requisite pieces. There's Olivia (Edie Falco), the pill-popping mom. Nina (Elisha Cuthbert) is the hot and bitchy cheerleader daughter. Paul (Martin Donovan) is the enabling dad who has to parent both his manipulative daughter and his drugged-out wife. There's also Nina's best friend Michelle (Katy Mixon), who is like a trashier, bitchier version of Nina. Connor (Shawn Ashmore) rounds out the main cast as the standard issue handsome high school athlete.
The Quiet does throw three new wrinkles into this set up. The expected love triangle isn't Nina-Connor-Dot. It's actually Michelle-Connor-Dot. That's because Nina is having an incestuous relationship with her father Paul. Oh, and Dot is pretending to be a deaf-mute to whom everyone spills their secrets because they think she can't hear.
You can probably guess how the script of this film goes, with people discovering secrets about other people and then pretending they don't know them. Dot's supposed deafness is the excuse for character monologues that are supposed to be provocative but are really quite wooden. Nina and Dot are enemies, then they're frenemies and then they're friends. A teddy bear gets his face burned off, Edie Falco walks around topless, somebody dies and the movie peters out after that.
The Quiet isn't a bad movie but it isn't much of a story. It has the setting and the pieces of a story, yet they never come together in any meaningful way. It never gets much into why Dot is faking being deaf and dumb to isolate herself from the world. Sometimes Nina is a bitch because she's compensating for her own anger and self-loathing, sometimes Nina is just a bitch and the film never differentiates between the two. Olivia could just have easily been a cardboard cut-out with the words "absent mom" scribbled on it. Paul swings from someone way too passive and well-adjusted to be having sex with his teenage daughter to a violent brute straight out of a woman-in-peril movie on the Lifetime channel. The only intriguing aspect of this script is the relationship between Nina and Michelle. You can see that Nina connects with Michelle, even though she's a disgusting skank, because Nina feels comfortable being with someone worse than she is.
To sum up, The Quiet is one of those independent movies that's more concerned with being artistic than entertaining. It almost entirely succeeds at not being entertaining. To the same extent, it fails at being artistic. Edie Falco's also the only one who gets naked in this film, so unless you've got a hankering for middle aged boobs, there's little else here.
Dot (Camilla Belle) is a teenage girl whose parents are dead and has ended up in the custody of her godparents. This suburban family has all the requisite pieces. There's Olivia (Edie Falco), the pill-popping mom. Nina (Elisha Cuthbert) is the hot and bitchy cheerleader daughter. Paul (Martin Donovan) is the enabling dad who has to parent both his manipulative daughter and his drugged-out wife. There's also Nina's best friend Michelle (Katy Mixon), who is like a trashier, bitchier version of Nina. Connor (Shawn Ashmore) rounds out the main cast as the standard issue handsome high school athlete.
The Quiet does throw three new wrinkles into this set up. The expected love triangle isn't Nina-Connor-Dot. It's actually Michelle-Connor-Dot. That's because Nina is having an incestuous relationship with her father Paul. Oh, and Dot is pretending to be a deaf-mute to whom everyone spills their secrets because they think she can't hear.
You can probably guess how the script of this film goes, with people discovering secrets about other people and then pretending they don't know them. Dot's supposed deafness is the excuse for character monologues that are supposed to be provocative but are really quite wooden. Nina and Dot are enemies, then they're frenemies and then they're friends. A teddy bear gets his face burned off, Edie Falco walks around topless, somebody dies and the movie peters out after that.
The Quiet isn't a bad movie but it isn't much of a story. It has the setting and the pieces of a story, yet they never come together in any meaningful way. It never gets much into why Dot is faking being deaf and dumb to isolate herself from the world. Sometimes Nina is a bitch because she's compensating for her own anger and self-loathing, sometimes Nina is just a bitch and the film never differentiates between the two. Olivia could just have easily been a cardboard cut-out with the words "absent mom" scribbled on it. Paul swings from someone way too passive and well-adjusted to be having sex with his teenage daughter to a violent brute straight out of a woman-in-peril movie on the Lifetime channel. The only intriguing aspect of this script is the relationship between Nina and Michelle. You can see that Nina connects with Michelle, even though she's a disgusting skank, because Nina feels comfortable being with someone worse than she is.
To sum up, The Quiet is one of those independent movies that's more concerned with being artistic than entertaining. It almost entirely succeeds at not being entertaining. To the same extent, it fails at being artistic. Edie Falco's also the only one who gets naked in this film, so unless you've got a hankering for middle aged boobs, there's little else here.