Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		3.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		1.5

Hush Blu-ray Movie Review

If that mockingbird don’t sing, momma’s gonna make you watch “Hush” on repeat.

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater August 12, 2011

It's somewhat fashionable these days to hate on Gwyneth Paltrow, whose rich-white-girl-with-good-taste shtick, by way of her lifestyle website GOOP, is grating to those who perhaps rightly see good old Gwynnie's recommendations for cashmere socks and thousand-dollar-a-night hotels rather tone deaf in the face of America's continuing economic troubles. Fair enough. If that's you, you'll find plenty of fuel for the Paltrow pyre in Hush, the film that--for my money--is the absolute worst in the actress' 20-year career. (Yes, that includes Shallow Hal and Country Strong.) I'm kind of surprised Hush is even being re-released on Blu-ray, because this is an utterly botched, epically awful movie whose only redeeming quality is the fact that it's so unswervingly mindless that it verges on campy, soap opera-ish fun. Verges being the operative word. I’ll confess to having a few good laughs at the expense of the theatrical acting and are you kidding me plot contrivances--you could never take this film as seriously as it takes itself--but the so-bad-it’s-good factor isn’t nearly enough to recommend this misdirected, under and over-acted drivel. Gwyneth herself has acknowledged how outrageously terrible Hush is, and it’s almost unfathomable to think she appeared here and in Shakespeare in Love in the same year.

Mother-in-Law

Hush is presumably a “psychological thriller,” but the thrills are nil and there’s nothing remotely believable about the minds or motivations of its characters. Paltrow plays Helen, a career woman at an architectural firm in New York who’s going with her boyfriend, Jackson (Johnathon Schaech), to meet his mother, Martha (Jessica Lange), for the first time. On an enormous horse farm in a rural Kentuckian nowheresville, Martha lives alone in a house that looks like Monticello by way of a plantation manor. At first, she comes across as a picture of Southern gentility; the staunch Catholic even downplays it when she sees Helen naked in Jackson’s room, when the two were expressly supposed to sleep separately. It soon becomes clear to us, however, that Martha is a duplicitous, backhanded compliment-dealing bitch who has ulterior motives. Her too-close-for-comfort relationship with her momma’s boy son is creepy and obsessive, and it seems a little strange how intensely she pressures the two lovebirds to stay on the farm for at least a few more days. Weirder still is the way she cleans the guest bathroom, leaving Helen’s contraceptive diaphragm out in full view. We definitely know something’s up by the time we see Martha standing at the top of the stairs, ominously watching Jackson and Helen having overzealous sex in the foyer. Yes, you guessed it: Martha has tampered with Helen’s birth control. She used to breed horses, but now she’s trying a different, human kind of animal husbandry. So, she desperately wants a grandchild. But why? That’s a question the film never satisfyingly answers.

What follows is a series of dryly predictable narrative junctures that could only be called “twists” if you were feeling particularly generous and uncritical. Everything about this movie seems pre-processed, manufactured, focus-tested to oblivion. Helen gets pregnant, of course, and marries Jackson in a sunny outdoor ceremony, but there’s soon trouble in marital paradise. Back in New York, a mugger threatens Helen, and you’d have to be asleep not to suspect that Martha put the mask-wearing menace up to this as a way of manipulating her daughter-in-law to leave the city. Sure enough, Helen suggests to Jackson that they move to Kentucky to help manage the farm and make it profitable again. Martha is pleased as punch, and in her own devious way begins to drive a wedge between the married couple, telling Jackson to give his wife some sexual space during the pregnancy and then dropping hints to Helen that her husband’s distance might be a sign that he’s cheating on her. Mother-in-law is an anagram for woman Hitler, and that coincidence has never been so apt as it is here. Unfortunately, Hush just isn’t any good. As the film stumbles toward the inevitable-- the baby’s birth--the turns in the plot stretch credulity to its breaking point and the whole affair becomes almost comically bad. The climax of campy awfulness is the birth scene, which has Paltrow sweaty and straining in bed, looking vaguely like Linda Blair in The Exorcist and screaming at Martha, “I am pushing, you bitch!.”

If you watch the film’s trailer you’ll notice several shots that clearly didn’t make it into the final cut, and supposedly the whole ending was re-shot and rearranged after studio pressure and disastrous early test screenings. I can’t imagine how bad that first cut must’ve been if it was even worse than the finished product. There’s just nothing about Hush that works. The “Hush Little Baby” leitmotif in the score is way too cheesy and obvious, and there are frequent moments of near-sublime inanity where all you can do is shake your head and wonder who came up with this stuff. (Hint: screenwriters Jonathan Darby and Jane Rusconi.) Worse, the supposed mounting suspense is killed by any thinking person’s foreknowledge of just about everything that will happen, barring the beyond-belief ending, which is so out-there and outright physically impossible that you’d never consider it as a possibility. As for the psychological underpinnings of the characters’ actions, there really aren’t any—not believable ones, anyway—and the ultimate direction of the plot suggests a poorly planned, lightweight version of Rosemary’s Baby. Most of the acting is cringe-worthy. Jessica Lange is a twitchy caricature of a southern belle gone old and bad, smoking like a chimney, swilling whiskey, and looking loopier than a drugged-up mental warn inmate. Taking the opposite approach, Johnathon Schaech has all the charisma of a hay bale. Gwyneth gives the best performance, but that’s not saying much. The only reason to revisit Hush is if you’re a Paltrow hater who will take some sort of sick satisfaction in seeing Gwennie being hounded barefoot and pregnant through the woods or, in one of the most ridiculous scenes, having bloody dead rats rain down upon her from an attic entrance.

Hush Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

As I mentioned in my review of Armed and Dangerous, Image Entertainment's catalog releases have an almost standardized look; they seem like they were simply run through the telecine machine, given minimal-to-no retouches, and placed on a single-layer disc with a low but acceptable bit rate. Other than this last part--which usually results in some compression noise--I'm totally fine with this approach, especially when it comes to older titles that wouldn't otherwise ever show up on Blu-ray. Hush features a 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer that presents a modest improvement over its standard definition counterpart, but subjectively speaking, the film just doesn't look very good. The image is perpetually soft--even in extreme close- ups there's a lack of truly fine detail--and the 35mm grain structure is so chunky and thick that it could easily pass for 16mm. Granted, this is a source- related issue, not a transfer problem, but just be aware that Hush ain't exactly eye candy. The print is very clean, however, and there are no traces of noise reduction or edge enhancement. Color fares moderately better than clarity. Most of the film has a slightly yellowish cast, with warm skin tones and rich neutral hues. Black levels can be a bit intense at times, crushing some shadow detail, but never detrimentally so. Light chroma noise does show up in many shots, but I didn't spot any other excessive compression problems, like macroblocking or banding.

Hush Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Hush comes with a default lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track that gets the job done with few embellishments. The most important element of the mix, of course, is dialogue, and the vocals are always clear and easily understood, with no muffling, crackling, or drop-outs. Christopher Young's score has the laziest "Hush Little Baby" leitmotif imaginable, but the music at least sounds good, with full dynamics and instrumentation that's spread throughout all 5.1 channels. Otherwise, the rear speakers only get infrequent use; there's some quiet ambience on occasion--wind and birds and other outdoorsy sounds, party chatter, etc.--and a few distinct directional effects, like a rapidly and loudly slamming door, but that's about it. The mix works, but it's never especially involving or immersive.

Hush Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The sole supplement on the disc is a lonely 1080p theatrical trailer.

Hush Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Unless you're some sort of bad-movie-watching masochist, there's no real reason to revisit Hush, one of the most dippy psychological thrillers of the 1990s and arguably the worst film of Gwyneth Paltrow's career. It's okay for a laugh, but there are far more deliciously awful movies available if you're simply looking for so-bad-it's-good entertainment.