RABBIT HOLE

“RABBIT HOLE” (Nicole Kidman & Aaron Eckhart)

This film broke my cardinal rule of ‘if you can’t relate to the characters, it is difficult to care about what happens to them’ because I couldn’t relate to this couples’ situation & yet I became emotionally involved in their predicament.
I’d say the main reason for this phenomenon was the acting – Nicole Kidman has never been better, she replaces Naomi Watts as my frontrunner for Best Actress with her magnificent portrayal of Becca Corbett; a woman that 8 months prior to the beginning of the film tragically lost her 4 year old son, Danny, when the youngster chased after his dog when he ran into the street.
The story centers on Becca and husband Howie (Aaron Eckhart – also in a career best performance) but includes a small circle of supporting players, the most significant being the teenaged boy, Jason (Miles Teller) that, through no fault of his own, struck and killed little Danny.
Becca and Howie deal with the death separately in almost every fashion – Howie enjoys viewing the last video he made of Danny on his phone; Becca wants to remove any reminders of Danny’s existence because it's simply too painful for her. Howie desperately tries to ‘get past’ the tragedy while Becca distances herself from him and attempts to display a cold veneer from everyone in her life.
Dianne Wiest plays Becca’s mother and she too is perfectly cast – she lost her son/Becca’s brother when he was 31, but in no way as painfully as her daughter. Still, mom insists on bringing up ‘Arthur’ whenever Danny’s passing is mentioned.
Howie wants to put their lives back together, while Becca seems to want to embrace the misery.
Becca agrees to attend a group therapy meeting with other couples that have lost a child. As one couple struggle to talk through their method of coping by saying “God needed an angel so he sent for our little girl” – Becca breaks out in a mocking laugh, espousing, “Why do you feel the need to say that? Why doesn’t God just make another angel? After all, he’s God!” . . . needless to say Becca doesn’t attend anymore meetings.
But Howie does and he gravitates toward Gabby (Sandra Oh – Should I say it again? -Clearly her best performance, though that’s not saying much)
Becca meanwhile begins stalking a young boy she sees on a school bus but the puzzling behavior is soon revealed (& it isn’t because she thought the boy looked like an older version of Danny)
“Rabbit Hole” packs an emotional wallop because these characters are so expertly portrayed they force you to care about them even if you’ve never lost a child. Throughout most of the film I felt empathy for Howie as he tries time and time again to both get passed the tragic event and yet still keep Danny’s memory alive while his spouse is taking the complete opposite route; putting up a stoic front while wallowing in pain on the inside and trying to erase Danny from their memories.
Yet, I cared about them both.
There were times when I wanted to hold Becca & times when I wanted to slap her. When she verbally attacks her mother for lumping Arthur’s death with Danny’s, I was behind her 100% - but when she confronts a mother in a supermarket for not caving in to the child’s candy demands, I was – at first shocked - & then displeased with her reaction.
Howie doesn’t skate through without his moment of despicable behavior either when he encounters the kid that accidentally ran over Danny – Mind you, this boy is pretty much blameless for the accident; he was just driving down the wrong street at the wrong time when a dumb kid darted in front of him – the way Howie treats this poor guilt ridden kid made me want to punch his lights out.
It’s an emotional ride that flies on different levels but each scene seemed to have meaning; each conversation seemed poignant – there were no wasted scenes. Unlike ‘Blue Valentine’, I CARED about these people. I WANTED a happy ending for them, though that didn’t have a chance in hell of happening.
When the film ended I sat in my seat unable to speak. My wife looked at me waiting for my comments and all I could utter was, “I can’t talk right now.”
If you want to see a very real uncompromising drama about a very human couple go see “Rabbit Hole”
I hope you have the same reaction that I did because just thinking about the ending – and the film in general - has my eyes welling with tears and a lump crawling up my throat...
& I couldn’t ‘relate’ to these people at all.