Quiet Chaos Vacuous, Desultory, with Laughs Poking Through

Details

Quiet Chaos
Directed by Antonello Grimaldi
IFC Films
Opens June 26, IFC Center

Related Content

• The Best Books of 2011
  December 21, 2011
• Vicious World
  August 10, 2011
• Dave Douglas & Brass Ecstasy
  March 16, 2011
• Cannes 2011 Has Issues
  May 18, 2011
• Q&A: Steven Bernstein On Sly Stone, All-Star Albums, And The Funk Of Late-'70s New York
  October 14, 2011

More About

• Nanni Moretti
• Antonello Grimaldi
• Sandro Veronesi
• Rufus Wainwright

What in the world ails Italian writer/actor/director Nanni Moretti, who made the wonderfully spry and funny Dear Diary (1993), then took a wrong turn with the tear-jerking The Son's Room (2001) and other trifles? The answer—that Moretti chose self-importance over the wry comedy he's good at—may lie in the few laughs poking out of this otherwise vacuous and desultory drama. Moretti wrote Quiet Chaos, which is directed by Antonello Grimaldi from a novel by Sandro Veronesi, and as Pietro, a suddenly widowed global business hot-shot trying to take stock of his grief-sodden life, turns in the same irritable, desiccated performance he gave in The Son's Room. Floored by his wife's sudden death while he was busy saving a drowning woman, Pietro parks himself on a bench outside his daughter's school and slowly defrosts by getting marginally involved with the street life around him. To goose the banal tedium of this constipated scenario, Grimaldi serves up tasteless side dishes of workplace chicanery, unpleasant sex, and a few baffling, but not unwelcome, bars of Rufus Wainwright's "Cigarettes & Chocolate Milk." Not even the momentary participation extraordinaire of a vertically challenged famous filmmaker self-exiled from the United States can save this phony pseudo-drama from its final collapse into a heap of inconsequence and male vanity.