I'm not sure if someone should have told director Jamie Babbit to lighten up or told co-screenwriters Abdi Nazemian and Micah Schraft to start taking themselves seriously. Whichever it may be, at some point in the production of the curiously confused The Quiet, all three should have gotten onto the same page. This is not to say it is a bad film -- it actually succeeds fairly well in spite of itself -- but there is a strong sense of a director and cast trying desperately to raise their script from camp to gravitas which ultimately makes The Quiet feel disjointed with several too many unintentional laughs.
The Disfunction Lurking Beneath the Idyllic Suburban Facade film is a genre unto itself, and Nazemian and Schraft's script does little to shroud or surpass its cliches and limitations. Instead, it makes several sloppy attempts at metaphor and similitude. The two girls, for instance, share a desire to be closer to their fathers which most likely stems from the absence of a mother. While Dot's died when Dot was only seven, Nina's becomes increasingly soporific thanks to a worsening drug dependency begun while she was recovering from an unexplained injury. As the film goes on, these desires lead both girls to act abnormally in ways ranging from bizarre to depraved.
It's this longing for both physical and emotional connection -- and the inability to express it satisfactorily -- which drives not only the two female protagonists, but also all the ancillary characters. Nina's best friend Michelle prattles endlessly about screwing Connor, the high school basketball star, while meanwhile, in unguarded moments, she timidly attempts to breach the subject of her attraction to Nina and her repressed lesbianism. Connor on the other hand, frustrated by not only his ADD and his virginity but also by an attraction to Dot which even he seems to find inconceivable, unfurls a seemingly endless supply of unflattering and off-putting admissions under the belief that she cannot hear him (and therefore cannot criticize him). All the while, Nina the Bitch begins to collapse under her own weight, giving Nina the Abused Victim fleeting chances to make herself known.
Oh yeah, there's also some nonsense about Beethoven. You know, cause he was deaf too.
What brings it all together in the end are the pair of surprisingly strong performances by Elisha Cuthbert and Camilla Belle. While Martin Donovan and Edie Falco seem strangely misguided, Cuthbert and Belle have a pretty thorough understanding of their characters. Cuthbert is rarely used as more than a pretty face on a prettier body, but aside from a few moments of maudlin melodrama, her Nina is surprisingly convincing. Her ability to jump immediately from insubordination to adulation to affliction and back again is in itself revelatory for an actress usually asked to play one note to its fullest; even more impressive is the way she never lets it seem schizophrenic, but instead perfectly intimates the fleeting, disinterested whims of a teenager.
Belle, on the other hand, is an actress more adept at emoting through gesture and expression than through voice, and at the risk of making it sound like a diminutive compliment, the role of Dot is perfectly suited to her skills. There is a stillness to her performance, yes, but not vacancy. Belle has the enviable ability to convey thought on the screen, and you can see it in every glance, in every pause. Though her character wishes to be invisible to the world, Belle demands your attention. Her sporadic narration tells you what has happened to her, but her sloping eyes -- a dark, striking mix of sadness and determination that I defy you to look away from -- tell you how those events have affected her. Simply put, hers is the kind of face for which close-ups were invented.
But ultimately, the contrivances of the film become too numerous and the half-hearted attempts at satire get in the way of what could have been a fairly engaging psychological thriller. Babbit controls the mood of the film admirably, but she is easy on her writers; if she had pressed them to round out their characters and sketch out the film's subplots and subtext more fully, The Quiet could have been a real under-the-radar surprise. Instead, it remains a curious oddity with too many goals and the wrong means for achieving them.