“Things aren’t nice anymore.”
The H-Bomb: In pursuing my ongoing quest to track down and watch all the Oscar contenders from last year (a quest I may never complete), I came upon this small film for which Nicole Kidman was nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award. Now, we all know I was a huge fan of “Black Swan” and that I strongly believed Natalie Portman deserved her Oscar win, but after seeing Kidman’s performance here… I still believe Natalie Portman deserved her Oscar. Which is not to take anything away from Kidman, who certainly does deliver not only one of the best performances of 2010, but one of the best of her entire career.
Kidman and Aaron Eckhart portray Becca and Howie, a married couple who lost their 4-year old son, Danny, in an accident some eight months earlier. Now I know what you’re thinking, the last time we went down this road, we had to deal with talking animal corpses and graphic genital mutilation. Well fear not, “Rabbit Hole” avoids the freakish “Antichrist” route in favor of being a more straightforward drama, showing how these two individuals try to cope with their loss in very different ways.
Becca’s approach to get over it is simply to not address it at all. Howie wants to go to group therapy, but she’d rather bury herself in baking or tending her garden. Howie likes to remember Danny by watching old videos of him. Becca, if she had her way, would get rid of every last reminder of him, including getting rid of his clothes, his pictures, and even selling their house. Neither one really blames the other for their son’s death, but there’s a tension between them. The kind that builds whenever they dodge the topic with small talk. The kind of tension that boils over when they finally collide over their opposed ways of dealing with the tragedy. It’s this failure to find a way to grieve together and put it behind them once and for all that threatens to destroy their once happy marriage completely.
It doesn’t help that Becca’s younger, wild child sister, Izzy (Tammy Blanchard) is now expecting her own baby, or that her mother (Dianne Wiest) is constantly comparing Becca’s loss to the death of her son, a 30-year old drug addict. Becca does, however, find solace in an awkward friendship she strikes up with a high school senior named Jason (Miles Teller). He’s a shy, quiet type, who himself is coping with something painful in the recent past. At first, Jason seems like some random kid that she met, but he isn’t. He and Becca do have a connection, but in the interest of spoilers, that‘s all I‘ll say.
Howie, meanwhile, finds himself becoming friendly with Gaby (Sandra Oh), a parent from the support group who lost her child some eight years ago. They start playing hookie from the group meetings in order to smoke weed in the parking lot instead, and, if you haven’t already guessed, the two find themselves attracted to each other. Will Howie remain faithful to a wife who has been steadily drifting away from him? And will their relationship ever recover?
“Rabbit Hole”, adapted by David Lindsay-Abaire from his own Pulitzer winning stage play, is ultimately about two people trying to come to terms with their great loss and move on. One would imagine that this would make for a very depressing watch, but it isn’t. Yes, it’s emotional. Yes, it’s moving. But unlike say, the thematically similar “21 Grams” (which is itself a good film), it never becomes overwrought or oppressively downbeat. There’s actually a good dose of humor sprinkled throughout the film that keeps it from becoming too heavy dramatically.
Being that this is a character driven piece, the acting is the most crucial element, and there are no slouches in that department. Kidman indeed delivers an award caliber performance, perhaps the best of her career. She had been slipping in recent years, appearing in questionable projects (what the hell was up with that useless “Invasion of the Body Snatchers“ remake), but here she is in fine form as a woman wracked with self guilt who is faced with constant reminders of her son no matter how hard she tries to put him out of mind. I feel she deserved an Oscar more for this film than she did for her overrated performance as Virginia Woolf in “The Hours”.
Eckhart, one of the most underrated actors out there, is equally terrific. Despite appearing upbeat on the surface, he is in just as much pain as his wife is on the inside, and is having just as difficult a time saying goodbye to his child. When the hell is the Academy going to give him the recognition he deserves? Young Teller, in his feature film debut, is excellent as the troubled teen, Jason. He holds his own opposite Kidman quite well, and I’m fairly certain we haven’t seen the last of him (he’ll be appearing in the upcoming “Footloose” remake).
John Cameron Mitchell, who in the past directed more avant-garde fair like “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and “Shortbus”, makes his most audience friendly movie to date and does a commendable job in taking the story’s stage origins and making it cinematic. Often times, when a play is adapted into the film, it’s glaringly obvious. For example, scenes of dialogue will be overly talky and go on for an eternity, and there will be few characters and even fewer locations, which creates a closed off, isolated feeling. That is not the case here. This has the flow and the openness of a film, and many of the characters’ emotions are conveyed through looks and facial expressions, instead of spoken words. Mitchell’s direction is subtle and straightforward, and he draws some effective performances out of his first rate cast.
“Rabbit Hole” is a damn fine film that almost no one has seen. It’s an impeccably acted piece about loss, recovery, and reconciliation. It’s not particularly groundbreaking, movies about grieving parents are nothing new, but this film approaches the subject in an intelligent, believable way that doesn’t feel clichéd or dramatically cheap. It may have received an Oscar nomination for Kidman’s performance, but it deserved several more.
