Rabbit Hole is a movie directed by John Cameron Mitchell with a script by David Lindsay-Abaire (based on his play). It is about a youngish couple living in the New York northern suburbs who are trying to re-group after their five-year-old son has been killed when hit by a car. Becca (Nicole Kidman) is a very icy, high strung woman who seems to keep her emotions bottled inside and doesn't deal well with typical coping things like group therapy. Howie (Aaron Eckhart) is a yuppie who is trying to actively work through his pain and deal with his wife's coldness. The two are so white they're nearly transparent and they live in one of the biggest, nicest houses you've ever seen overlooking the Hudson River. As Howie flirts with a fellow grieving parent (Sandra Oh) at the group therapy place, Becca stalks, and then gets into contact with, the high school kid who hit their son.
At some point in the middle of this film, I realized that basically nothing had happened. We see two people coping differently with pain and moving around one another rather than working together. We see them (very, very) slowly move to places where they can begin to heal, and we see them fight. It's hard to like either character much: Becca is totally closed off to the emotional world and Howie is such a douchebag that I know I would hate him if I knew him in life.
I think part of my feelings about Becca are magnified by my feelings for Nicole Kidman. She is so wooden as an actress that it's hard to ever connect to her. Here she shows almost no emotion at all - only bursting into tears in the penultimate scene. But tears are a very shallow, outward display of emotions; I really want to see some subtlety or depth to her feelings. We get none of that. Eckhart is not as bad as she is, but he's also very closed and hard to relate to. I think the real problem here is the script, which doesn't really examine each one enough. Both of them function as "types", with her as the grieving mother (and that's all) and him as the loving husband trying to related to his superficial wife (and that's all as well).
Mitchell gives us almost no style throughout the whole film. The opening credits segment shows Kidman planting in her garden (Get it?! She's trying to make things grow around her house! Ooooohhhhh!) and there are some lovely cuts and a nice general look. I think this scene is the aesthetic zenith of the film, as everything else turns rather beige after this point. I am surprised coming from Mitchell, who, like him or not, has had some style in past movies.
There's really nothing bad about this film, but it's just not very good or deep. Something about movies with dead kids really annoys me. Like holocaust narratives or movies about September 11, they rely so much on pure emotion (OMG - it's SO SAD!) that other smaller things fall by the wayside. That is exactly what happens here. I don't know why I'm supposed to like Kidman, I don't know much about their kid, I don't see anything here that I can give a shit about.
Stars: 2 of 4
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