Rabbit Hole Reviews

Since I have a weak spot for Nicole Kidman and since I kept hearing good things about this flick, I was really eager to check it out. Honestly, because of the concerned subject, I was also rather apprehensive. I mean, when I told my wife what it was about, she told me right away that she wasn’t interested which is quite understandable. I mean, a few years back, she lost her father which was really shattering (as a matter of fact, she still have a hard time with it) and to think of losing one of our children would be unbearable for her but for me as well. So, if you have kids, this movie is not really a nice watch, even if some critics or viewers would tell you that there was still some humor, the overall sadness was pretty heavy but it was also what makes this drama valuable. Still, even though it was pretty good, I wasn’t completely blown away by the whole thing. I mean, it was a nice approach to not have a straightforward plot and instead having these random events involving the grieving couple. However, somehow, those events were not always compelling and I thought that those meetings between Nicole Kidman and the perpetrator were very unlikely. I mean, it was an interesting touch but I really had a hard time believing that they would get along like that. Still, Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart were both really impressive, only for them it is worth checking this flick. Furthermore, it was an interesting change of pace for John Cameron Mitchell. Indeed, John Cameron Mitchell’s directing debut was ‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch’, one of the most over-the-top and excessive movies I have ever seen and this new directing effort was exactly the opposite. Indeed, it was a very sober, rather minimalistic affair but considering the sensitive subject, it was really appropriate. To conclude, I thought it was a pretty solid drama and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you like the genre.

It’s sometimes a little too clean in how it deals with emotionally harrowing material, and frequently looks like it was shot inside of a sterile Ikea design book, but Rabbit Hole is a quiet gut-punch of a film that never plays any of its turns too broadly. It prefers to create a communal sense of sadness between the characters and the audience without resorting to maudlin hysterics or wallowing around in hyperbole and self-flagellations.

Picking up eight months after the accidental death of their four-year-old son, Becca and Howie are trying their best to regain an emotional foothold in life. Neither is entirely successful, nor do they appear to even be remotely trying to regain some remnant of normalcy. Each prefers to hide away in their self-contained shell of mourning. Their anger and depression is palpable from the very beginning.

Becca is all crazed emotional outbursts over the tiniest infractions against anyone who gets in her path. She has numbed herself to the point where her daily routine is robotic and efficient with no human touch. A scene where she emotionlessly removes her son’s drawings from the fridge, packs up his clothing and nearly scrubs every trace of him from the house is unbelievably cold, yet there’s a core of truth to her actions. The same could be said of Howie who finds a support group very sympathetic. His repeatedly watching a saved video of his son, the last one that he took before the accident, speaks to his preference for remembering and embracing his son’s existence. Becca wants everything to be new and fresh, Howie wants familiarity and routine. They have effectively built themselves closets in which to hide away from the glare of the rest of the world.

If all of this sounds practically oppressive in its empathetic feelings and melancholic nature, well, it can be. Luckily David Lindsay-Abaire who wrote the screenplay, adapted from his own play, knows that life is filled with just as much unintentional hilarity as it is in heartbreak. And some of the emotional outbursts and fleeting moments of trying to reconnect to each other or their family and friends are darkly comic. It is these acute and accurate observations of life that make Rabbit Hole overcome the few problems that happen along the way. A scene with Howie crying into the dog is slightly understandable even if it is played perhaps a touch too big, or that the films sometimes too obviously sign posts us to its inevitable destination of healing and gradual return to normal everyday life.

But the strongest asset Rabbit Hole has going for it are the two central performances by Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart. When it came out, Kidman justifiably got the lion’s share of praise and awards, but Eckhart delivers a performance that is just as strong, equally hitting all of the complicated twists and turns that his character must make within a single scene. Rabbit Hole is a great ensemble and it’s a pity more of the actors weren’t singled out for high-praise, but Kidman spent years as a movie star before returning to her roots as a dark, fearless and complicated actress of great strength. Rabbit Hole proves that her best work isn’t in big studio fluff like Nine, but daring films like To Die For.

For obvious reasons, RABBIT HOLE can't be recommended to any parent who has lost a son or daughter. As one character wisely puts it at one point, it's the type of tragedy that becomes easier to bear as time goes on, but it never really goes away. A parent who has been in that situation would be easily devastated by the memories that the film would bring back. But for the rest of us, RABBIT HOLE proves to be an engrossing and effective suburban drama. It may not be great, and it may not be the most heart-wrenching film you've ever seen, but considering how treacly most movies of this ilk are (I'm looking at you, MY SISTER'S KEEPER), RABBIT HOLE is a welcome surprise.

The film centers on Becca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart), a couple living in a nice suburban house. Instead of tossing information straight into our face, the film chooses a subtle and gradual method to let us know that, a few months ago, they lost their 4-year-old son, Danny. It takes even longer for us to discover the "Why?", "Who?" and "How?" of Danny's death, and that's one of the aspects that makes RABBIT HOLE occasionally fascinating. It slowly reveals its layers until we finally get the entire story and understand the magnitude of the tragedy. Becca and Howie start going to a group therapy session, but on their first night, Becca is incredibly put off by the whole dynamic and decides not to go to the group anymore. Howie, on the other hand, likes the group and decides to start attending the meetings by himself. This leads him to start getting acquainted with Gaby (Sandra Oh), a woman who is also in the group and whose husband has also decided not to attend the meetings anymore. Meanwhile, although Becca is supposed to play the role of stay-at-home housewife, she chooses to spend her days in certain different (unexpected) ways. I'd rather not spoil it, because it's easily the film's most interesting aspect, but suffice it to say that she starts stalking a high school senior, Jason (Miles Teller), for reasons we're not initially aware of.

We get three "types" of scenes during RABBIT HOLE: 1) Becca and Howie's conversations and arguments at home, as they both clash with each other due to the different ways in which they're coping with Danny's death, 2) Becca's interactions with her mother and sister, who try to help alleviate Becca's grief, but the attempts sometimes have the opposite effect, and 3) Becca and Howie's forays when they're not with each other. The first two "types" of scenes work decently well, but often enter way too much into melodramatic territory (yes, even for a film about coping with the death of a 4-year-old). A few of the scenes feel "obligatory" in the sense that they feel like scenes that NEED to be included because of the fact that it's a film about parental bereavement. A good example is a scene in which Becca randomly lashes out at a woman at the grocery store because of how the woman was treating her son; many audience members will probably find the scene amusing, but for me, this felt like a moment that was obviously inserted to rouse the viewers more than anything else, almost as if the film felt the need to have a more action-based moment in order to give the audience a reprieve from all the dialogue-based scenes.

Without a doubt, though, RABBIT HOLE is at its strongest when it gives us a glimpse at what Becca and Howie individually go off to do when they're not with each other. It makes the film feel more like a character examination of how each of them is handling this dire situation (whereas the other two types of scenes just make it feel like too much of a straightforward suburban tragedy). There's nothing surprising about the quasi-relationship that materializes between Howie and Gaby, but their moments together are still very much pleasant to watch. A sequence involving their smoking weed and its consequences for how they react to people's comments at the meeting is particularly funny. However, the VERY best aspect of RABBIT HOLE comes with the interactions between Becca and high schooler Jason, whom we soon find out is the person who accidentally ran over Danny with his car. This is the most unconventional relationship between a culprit and the victim's loved one that I've ever seen in a movie, and if most of the film's running time had been dedicated to that, RABBIT HOLE would've easily been a great film. The conversations that these two have are great, in particular the one they have towards the end involving parallel universes, in which the two characters, without directly saying this to one another, feel some hope that maybe there's some other universe in which their situations are better than the sad reality they're facing.

The cast is uniformly good. Nicole Kidman has been getting a lot of acclaim for her performance, and while I agree that she's very good, I'm going to concur with what an IMDB user said about it on the message board for the film: "It's the kind of performance we've become jaded to." Hey, at least I was honest and didn't pretend like I came up with the comment. But it captures my feelings perfectly because when you've already been so mesmerized by someone's performance elsewhere (EYES WIDE SHUT and THE HOURS in this case) it's a little difficult to be too impressed with something that isn't AS great.

When RABBIT HOLE steps outside of the comfort zone of the familiar melodramatic scenes between husband and wife and instead takes us on the individual journey that each of these two characters goes through, the film has hints of greatness. But those moments don't account for the majority of the film's running time, which is why I can only go as far as saying that RABBIT HOLE is a good, albeit sometimes too mechanical, piece of dramatic filmmaking.