SOFT AND QUIET is one of those movies where the less you know about it ahead of time, the more effective it is. So, if you have not yet seen it, you should watch it first before reading the analysis below.
The film begins in a, well, soft and quiet manner: A woman who obviously takes care of herself is in the bathroom of a school and seems distraught at the result of a pregnancy test. Though we do not have information about her background or even the actual result, her reaction elicits sympathy in us for her.
Next, we see her passing a janitor as she exits the school. Her body language betrays discomfort at getting too close. Not having any context, I dismissed it as possibly the woman having a wide personal space.
She then engages warmly with a kindergartner who has not yet been picked up by his mom, as it is after hours. She turns out to be his teacher and tells him to tell the janitor to not mop the floor until he is gone. He might slip, and besides, he needs to learn to assert himself. This struck me as a little odd, but I still did not connect the dots: perhaps she is a bit overzealous about her role as a teacher, I thought.
The mother arrives, looking for her son, and the teacher tells her a bald lie, that he almost slipped and hurt himself, and was talking to the janitor about it. Now the alarm bells start to ring.
The teacher's behavior at first mystified me until the infamous pie shot a few minutes later, and then everything suddenly became clear.
So many people (especially on the right) say that racism has been largely brought under control, or even that there is no racism in society today because they fail to perceive it. They do not see it, so they think it does not exist. But just because we do not perceive something, that does not mean it is not there.
The ingenious prologue gives an eye-opening example of this: the racist behavior was there right in front of my eyes, all along, but because I saw a classy-looking woman in emotional distress who was quite warm to her student I failed to perceive it, and whatever red flags appeared I rationalized away. And I am actually someone who tries to keep eyes open.
It is easy to perceive racist or bigoted behavior when the person engaging in it is already recognized to be so. Where is the boundary between insight and rationalization when a person is not already labeled in our minds as a bigot?
The pie shot is just a prelude to show that what initially seems like a mixer between nice ladies in a church turns out to be essentially a nazi brainstorming session.
What impressed me here is that the movie allows each bigot/racist/nazi to express themselves without it turning into caricature. Real people talk like that, and it helps make the film more believable.
The women have various levels of skill at putting a nice face on their ugly persuasion. At the abrupt conclusion of the meeting, we still wonder how much evil these ladies are really capable of. How much of it is just empty talk, and how much of it can translate into evil deeds?
The question is answered in the second and third act in a shocking sequence which could barely be more horrific. But rather than recounting events, I would like to focus on the careful study of the faces of bigotry presented here: there is the ideological bigot, the protagonist teacher who turns bigotry into a formal belief system; the cowardly bigot, who talks a big talk when bullying someone as part of a group, but is the first to pull a gun when things get heated and the first to break under pressure; the classist bigot who always blames her own problems on others, and cannot tolerate the targets of her hate having it better than her, and the bigoted sociopath, for whom bigotry is not so much an end but a means to an end, namely an arena for indulging in sociopathic behavior.
We also have a different kind of cowardly bigot in the form of the teacher's husband. He is the most clear-headed of the group and tries to dissuade the others from acting on their impulses, but his motivations are not altruistic. He is driven by a fear of consequences, the trouble it will bring with the law and his employment, and not by moral compunction. The lack of moral scruples and the power his wife holds over him makes it relatively easy to turn him into an accomplice.
There is an interesting dynamic between the couple whereby the ostensible efforts of the teacher to build up her husband to her ideological ideals, such as demanding that he avenge disrespect toward her because it means disrespect toward him, end up emasculating him. A brilliant scene which encapsulates this dynamic shows her slapping him, which he answers by slapping himself even harder.
The film is shown in one apparent continuous shot, which greatly increases the urgency of the events, and is especially well-suited for the story. All the actors are convincing, and in all other aspects the movie is well-crafted.
The sociological depth of this film is matched by few others I know of, but the sheer horror in the third act tends to overwhelm it. On the other hand, the title, an allusion to how the teacher sees her approach to spreading her ideological beliefs, was clearly intended to be ironic, and so the horror was necessary not only to show how evil talk breeds evil actions, but also that beyond a certain threshold, evil can never be soft and quiet.
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