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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.
