Interview. Jamie Babbit.

You know Michael Guillén from The Evening Class (and if you don't, do see his wonderful and quite personal entry in the Friz Freleng Blog-A-Thon and his latest, on Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu). Today sees his first interview for GreenCine, in which he talks with Jamie Babbit not only about her latest feature, The Quiet, but also about what makes the closet such a resilient fixture in Hollywood.

Most critics have found The Quiet frustrating. Cinematical's Martha Fischer, for example, finds it "a movie seething with unrealized potential."

Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: "Neither ambitious enough to take seriously nor sleazy enough to enjoy, The Quiet flirts with the trappings of exploitation cinema without going all the way."

Ella Taylor (LA Weekly/Voice): "The Quiet has an excellent supporting cast in Edie Falco, Martin Donovan, and Katy Mixon, in a minor but more interesting role as the school vixen, and is competently, even lyrically, directed in high definition by Babbit (with input from students at the University of Texas). But thematically the movie never reaches beyond the ready-for-prime-time mentality that specializes in psychological shorthand."

Leading a furious round of Reverse Shot reviews at indieWIRE, Lauren Kaminsky seems pretty ticked off: "[T]his film somehow manages to surpass even American Beauty (to which the filmmakers no doubt hope their effort will be compared) in hateful representations of women, dopily sympathetic men, and heaps of misplaced misogyny." Yikes.

The AV Club's Scott Tobias: "Abandoning the garish hyperactivity of her previous effort, the camp comedy But I'm a Cheerleader, director Jamie Babbit here employs a chilly ambience that makes the film seem weightier and more substantial than it turns out to be."

Ed Gonzalez in Slant: "Babbit goes for the perfume-commercial chic of an Adrian Lyne film while her writers push for the sexual frankness of The Slumber Party Massacre. This mismatch of intentions produces a misshapen curiosity at once impossible to dismiss because of its rich ideas but difficult to defend because of its slapdash execution."

"Director Jamie Babbit has a certain gift for gloomy atmospherics that might work in a flat-out horror film," suggests Salon's Andrew O'Hehir. "But The Quiet wobbles around between genres, a terrible example of what can happen when the wrong sets of talented people get together."

Justin Ravitz in the New York Press: "This is an absurdly sordid B-movie that doesn't follow its own whispered suggestions about moral responsibility and human empathy."

For SuicideGirls, Daniel Robert Epstein also talks with Babbit.

Updates: Steve Erickson at Gay City News: " didn't think it was possible, but The Quiet beats Michael Cuesta's Twelve and Holding for the coveted crown of 2006's most smug assault on American suburbia."

indieWIRE's interview.

Posted by dwhudson at August 25, 2006 5:49 AM