The Quiet
reminds me of that old Conan O’Brien sketch, which I haven’t seen in a
while, entitled “Seeee-crets,” wherein a guest usually participates in
a taped confessional by admitting, with clench-jawed commitment, to
some absurd, mock-dark skeleton in the closet. The Quiet is
marked by a similar solemnity, except that it doesn’t fancy itself a
joke. Shot by M. David Mullen in what is possibly the most dimly lit
house ever, it’s a dreadfully self-serious and undeservedly
self-satisfied drama, an exposé of idyllic suburbia that offers forth
the surface appearance of evocative contrasts with none of the
corresponding psychological depth.

Leading the parade of
wafer-thin characterizations is high-school cheerleader Nina (Elisha Cuthbert, also a producer), whose sneering, unsubstantiatedly vicious
demeanor is egged on by an equally catty and bitchy friend, Michelle
(Katy Mixon). This, despite an outwardly perfect life, naturally means
that she’s masking a dark secret. The most immediately apparent source
of Nina’s irritation is Dot (When a Stranger Calls’ Camilla
Belle), a silent, presumably deaf girl, whom Nina’s parents, architect
Paul (Martin Donovan) and interior decorator Olivia (Edie Falco), have
taken in after the death of her father. Dot is the very definition of
unassuming, but nonetheless becomes a whipping post for Nina’s pent-up
anger — even more so when letterman Connor (Shawn Ashmore), Michelle’s
crush of the moment, expresses an interest in her. All manner of
guarded secrets then come tumbling forth, both in confession and
through deduction, with life-altering consequences for nearly all those
involved.

The Quiet is actually director Jamie Babbit’s second feature film (she’s also helmed episodes of Popular, Gilmore Girls and Nip/Tuck), but it exhibits none of the colorful eccentricity of her first — the zonked-out high school lesbian comedy But I’m a Cheerleader,
which I found dreadful, but at least flamboyant and original, bad in an
interesting fashion. Penned by Abdi Nazmian and Micah Schraft, though, The Quiet
merely substitutes tranquility for perspicacity, and is driven by the
twin engines of illogicality and whimsicality. Characters are defined
frequently only through others’ descriptions of them, and rarely
through their own behavior. Olivia is a pill-popping, emotionally
inattentive zombie, though we see no evidence of that in our first (and
longest) encounter with her; Connor, meanwhile, is a “hunk” (and
desired, quite explicitly, by Michelle) merely because he’s the only
young male in the movie. The only instance in the story in which this
doesn’t really hold true stands in stark, further jarringly contrast
because of these failings in dimensional shading.

Then there’s the niggling matter of Dot’s deafness and muteness.
Throughout the film, it’s advanced that she can read lips if people are
facing her. Yet The Quiet, a movie presumably predicated upon
carefully modulated mood and a few key revelations, is remarkably slack
about enforcing this scene to scene, so twists that in theory should
surprise characters within the movie will have you howling, “Idiot!” at
the screen. By the time The Quiet’s utterly preposterous ending
unravels — complete with a bizarre, out-of-left-field false confession
that both makes no sense within the actual narrative and offers no
sense of authentic catharsis, release or reprieve for the character(s)
it lets off the hook — you’ll be struck dumb in your own way. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 95 mins.)

Malinda Williams). In the wake of the death of gangster patriarch
Spats (Ving Rhames), Rooster runs an end-around on ruthless and
unscrupulous hooch merchant Trumpy (Terrence Howard), a ploy that
proves dangerous. Percival, meanwhile, is smitten with Angel (Paula
Patton, no relation to Antwan), a torch singer with a secret, who comes
to town on a temporary contract and finds herself caught up in the
ensuing uncertainty and conflict.

Writer-director Bryan Barber, a frequent music-video collaborator
and longtime friend of Outkast, knows the pair well enough to write to
their relative strengths, and not ask them to stretch too far beyond
their comfort zone. For Patton (the less screen experienced of the two)
this means a role shaped as much by those around him (including Bobb’e
J. Thompson as a younger iteration of the character) as Rooster’s own
actions; for Benjamin it means a nervous and introverted role that taps
into his soulful quietude. While full of plenty of crooked,
idiosyncratic detail, Idlewild, which got its start as an HBO
movie, doesn’t strive for an exacting historical accuracy so much as an
emotional truth, and in this regard it succeeds.

Where the movie really sings, though, is in its cathartic, mash-up
dance sequences, choreographed by Hinton Battle. Combining elements of
swing, jitterbug, break-dance and the Lindy Hop, these numbers shimmer
with unbridled joy and a pure, pleasing energy unmatched by anything
else on the big screen this year. Barber’s video-honed style, too,
feeds the story. While the beginning and end of the movie offer the
most stylized bits, he also deploys classic editing techniques, subtle
flashes of slow motion and fast forward throughout, and a soundtrack —
which includes a score from workhorse John Debney — that incorporates
various bleeps, scratches and modern high-hats folded into
period-inflected music.

While driven, especially early on, by an overt theatricality that
extends to many of its supporting performances (Faizon Love is a hoot
as blustering club owner “Sunshine” Ace), Idlewild locates a
balanced contrast in Percival, the heart of the film, and Benjamin
knocks this role out of the park with a perfectly measured performance.
If movies are indeed a siren call to the musical performer — who’s also
cameoed in Be Cool and given an equally grounded turn in Four Brothers — the unadulterated delight of Idlewild proves he has an equally felicitous future there. (Universal/HBO Films, R, 123 mins.)

It would be the autobiographical novels Post Office, Women and Hollywood, along with, eventually, the 1987 movie Barfly — all searing portraits of a distinctly Southern California underclass — that would resonate worldwide and turn blue collar novelist and poet Charles Bukowski into a celebrated countercultural icon. The biographical drama Factotum, though, takes as its core Bukowski’s same-titled second tome, as well as excerpts from three other books, all centering around drunken roustabout Henry Chinaski, widely acknowledged to be the writer’s alter ego.



Directed by Norwegian filmmaker Bent Hamer (Kitchen Stories) and released this month through IFC Films, the movie is a rambling, episodic mock-biography of Bukowski, anchored by a fine, square-jawed starring performance from Crash‘s Matt Dillon. Like his creator, Chinaski swings through a wide variety of low-paying, non-creative, menial jobs (working at a bike shop, a pickle factory, as an ice deliveryman and janitor) and a smaller handful of codependent, quasi-abusive monogamous relationships (embodied here by Marisa Tomei as a fling, and Lili Taylor as on-again/off-again girlfriend Janet). Truly playing the field, you see, would take too much effort — as well as time away from Chinaski’s favorite mistress, the bottle. Through it all Chinaski pens short stories and sends them off blindly to a magazine in New York, subsisting on jug-wine and pancakes, cigarettes and melancholy.

Hamer has a penchant for fade-ins and -outs that will strike some as too affected, and the “story” here is undeniably paced like a snail, and at times willfully crude. (One amusing segment finds Chinaski getting his testicles delicately taped up into a homemade diaper after he contracts crabs from Janet.) Dillon, though, has in his age settled into a more mature, relaxed and naturalistic delivery, and he here approximates Bukowski’s deep, rumbling and inflected timbre — part wizened yet intoxicated preacher’s cadence, part sonorous bullshitter — in a manner that really gives you a window into Chinaski’s inherent glumness, his death-grip hold on misery. You get a palpable sense of how Chinaski’s (and thus Bukowski’s) acting out stems from his racing, perpetually dissatisfied inner monologue, and how his general disagreeableness and bad attitude toward those around him is hardwired to an irreconcilable urgency to locate in both life and his art the same sort of forward-leaning insistence he feels in his soul.

For Bukowski, writing was living. An arthouse curio, Factotum isn’t for all tastes, but it’s studded with dark delights (Chinaski stalking one employer, trying to score a check for a half-day’s work), and it conveys with unflinching precision the life of a dinged, beaten-down spirit for whom creativity wasn’t just an impulse but rather a compulsion. (IFC Films, R, 94 minutes)