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THE QUIET Send This Review to a Friend
Director Jamie Babbit’s “The Quiet,” with a screenplay by Abdi Nazemian and Micah Schraft, teeters between the daring and the ludicrous. It would seem to be making a statement against incestuous abuse, but some of the scenes are so over the top as to veer toward parody. Yet one’s attention is not allowed to wander, primarily because of the performers and their histrionics.
Get a load of this household. In a suburban town Edie Falco and Martin Donovan play parents, Olivia and Paul, who have a pretty cheerleader daughter named Nina (Elisha Cuthbert), who flaunts her sexuality and arrogance and poses a behavior problem. Olivia and Paul adopt Dot, an orphaned teenager (Camilla Belle), who is deaf but can lip read. Her presence becomes a catalyst in the family, and the atmosphere grows increasingly tense.
Nina is daddy’s girl in more ways than one, and Olivia, her mom, is spaced out on drugs. Donovan as Paul gives the kind of performance that makes one nervous, and rightly so. There is creepiness hovering over this household, and one senses that fury may erupt at any moment.
The screenplay stretches the boundaries like a soap opera gone off the deep end. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
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