Adapted from David Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Rabbit Hole” ferries us down into the blackest void of parental despair and bravely leaves us without a sturdy rope to climb back out.
Becca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart) are an affluent married couple half-heartedly pursuing the American dream somewhere in the gorgeous Northeast. After their young son, Danny (Phoenix List), is killed by a car, they fight to hold on to his memory, and each other, without letting the future slip away. While anxiously reshaping the physical and social landscapes around her, Becca makes contact with Jason (Miles Teller) — a burgeoning comic-book artist and the teen driver who’s car killed her son — and begins to find meaning in her life again through his creativity and heart-felt confessions.
Very few films that strive for poignancy and profundity ever achieve their aim. Solemn-looking actors staring longingly through windows, cool-hued lens filters and intense bursts of irrational anger can be tough sells to an audience and often ring false. Generally eschewing nuanced emotional acting, action movies don’t have that problem, making their bread and butter on special effects and flashy set pieces — a fact that allows Megan Fox to be a movie star. Movies like “Rabbit Hole,” on the other hand, must be smartly-directed, well-written and expertly acted to fulfill the measure of their creation. And it is my pleasure to report that John Cameron Mitchell’s take on this familiar tale of love and loss in American suburbia scores high marks in all three categories.
Both Eckhart and Kidman give strong performances and make us feel their respective struggles, but Kidman’s layered, emotional execution drives the film. Her intricate charades of normalcy — dressing up in business attire to visit her former employer downtown or planting flowers like she imagines normal homemakers might do — are small ways of moving forward, and help us empathize with the suffering character. Howie, conversely, drowns himself in memories of the past, and becomes infuriated when Becca cleans out Danny’s room and accidentally (?) deletes a video of him from Howie’s iPhone.
Both actors, in accordance with Mitchell’s subdued tone, avoid slipping into melodrama, a common mistake in films like these. But in his effort to court the emotional subtlety often overlooked in the wake of tragedy, Mitchell (“Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” and “Shortbus”) misses much of the raw power of the individual so crucial to evoking genuine response in the audience.
“Rabbit Hole” will certainly make you feel, but it may not have the lasting effect the filmmakers intend.
