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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.
6/10
