The Quiet Review

August 10, 2006 10:47 AM
by [email]

Despite provocative material, The Quiet is an uninspiring film that never manages to engage.

The story revolves around two teenage girls. Nina (Elisha Cuthbert) is a cute blond cheerleader and the proverbial most popular girl in school. She also has the ostensibly perfect family: her father a successful architect who designed their newly built house (the “best” in the neighborhood comments one of Nina’s friends) and her mother an interior designer whose fitting out their house.

Of course, not everything is as it seems. Nina’s mother (Eddie Falco) is a prescription pill popper and spends half her scenes passed out. It is not a challenging roll for Falco ― think of a half comatose Carmella Soprano. Nina’s dad (well played by Martin Donovan) has his own dark secrets and is not hardly as nice as he seems to the outside world.

Nina’s “perfect” family has taken in their goddaughter Dot (Camilla Belle), a deaf mute who has come to live with them after her father tragically dies. Dot is a complete social outcast and is hated and cruelly treated by Nina (why is not exactly clear ― then again, who understands the motivations of teenage girls).

The girls, of course, have their own secrets ― everyone has secrets in this movie. I won’t tell you what they are, but we learn Nina’s pretty early on and Dot’s can be guessed almost from the beginning. Both secrets have strong dramatic possibility; however, neither is developed or revealed in an interesting manner.

Dot, because she can’t hear anything, becomes a confident of sorts; i.e., people tell her things precisely because she cannot hear them. Alas, while such scenes had great potential, none were done in an interesting way. For example, in one scene, Nina “tells” Dot her secret (whispering it in the middle of the crowded lunchroom). It would have been pretty dramatic too, if we had not been all but officially told it already.

Overly heavy foreshadowing is a problem throughout. If I told you all the secrets and twists that occur in the movie, it would sound pretty dramatic. Unfortunately, everything is effectively revealed before it happens, sapping any real sense of drama.

There are also a number of little things wrong with the movie, all of which push you farther and farther away and weaken any sense of believability.

For one, Dot, as everyone knows, can read lips, but when people tell her their deep dark secrets, they are often talking right to her.

Another problem is that Camilla Belle is smoking hot. Nothing wrong with that, except that she’s supposed to be playing the awkward, ugly girl. Even when they have her in the frumpy clothes (as Nina says, she dresses like a janitor) she’s still better looking that Elisha Cuthbert.

And I nearly fell out of my seat when the supposed school jock Conner (played by the 5’11” and fairly unathletic looking Shawn Ashmore, most famous for playing “Iceman” in the X-Men movies) reveals that he is hoping to get a basketball scholarship to UConn. Yes, I know the 5’7” Tom Cruise once played a football hero, but Cruise could at least pull off the confidence and swagger of a BMOC. Ashmore seems a lot closer to Jason McElwain, the autistic hoopster ESPN has been making famous, than a future Huskie ― except the autistic kid can actually shoot.

On the bright side, there isn’t really anything overly painful about the movie. It won’t piss you off or insult your intelligence, just bore you a little.

The Quiet opens on August 25, 2006 in NYC and L.A.

I give it *½.