Rabbit Hole

This is not a perfect film. The only reason I say that right up front, right out of the gate like that, is because if I don’t, I’m going to wind up writing a long-winded rambling explanation of why this is, in fact, a perfect film. It’s a very, very good film, but it’s not quite perfect. It does many of the things that I admire most about film as an art form, and it avoids most of the things that I don’t really appreciate about film—but not quite all of those things.

It’s the story of Howie (Aaron Eckhart) and Becca (Nicole Kidman), a couple who have recently lost their four-year-old in a tragic accident. The accident is only eight months in the past, and Howie and Becca are struggling to come to terms with living through such a thing. They live in a suburb of New York, in a huge house, and are clearly people of intellect and means. At some level, they understand that they must eventually go on with life; but there is nothing that they have in their lives that seems to help them along that path. Howie still goes to work, but Becca has left her job, and they are so far unable (or perhaps unwilling) to reconnect with friends and neighbors.

They go through the motions, but what is missing from their lives is not just the physical form of a little boy, but some part of each of their souls. Eckhart and Kidman are both equal to the task of playing characters who are in many ways empty, robbed of something that was so integral a part of them, both individually and as a couple. The film’s tagline is “The only way out is through.” There is no way for them to get through their grief without facing it, but they go about this in different ways.

There is, of course, a powerful sense of guilt that radiates from both Howie and Becca, a feeling that by going on with their own lives they are in some way dishonoring their son or his memory. Becca is unable to reestablish physical intimacy with Howie when, early in the film, she rejects Howie’s attempt to massage her shoulders and then accuses him of trying to seduce her. Kidman does an excellent job here of showing on her face, in one moment, her body’s physical response to the pleasure she feels from her husband’s hands on her shoulders, and in the next moment, her rejection of his touch with a guilty shiver.

The inability to return to physical intimacy is an outward sign of their inability to communicate effectively with each other in any meaningful way. They try a group therapy session, even though Howie knows that it is not the kind of thing that Becca will respond to. He continues to attend the sessions even after she has given up, and she begins to take down their son’s paintings from the refrigerator and bag up his clothes for donation to the Goodwill. He can’t get right with the paintings being gone, but she can’t get right with their still hanging on the refrigerator, and neither of them can properly talk about it.

Becca is the more frustrating of the two, because she is the one who seems to think that the world should be waiting on her to process her grief in her own way before it begins turning again. She is the very embodiment of the overprivileged, exurban sense of entitlement that makes Americans look ridiculous to people in most of the rest of the world. One of the best scenes in the film occurs when Becca goes back to Sotheby’s, the New York auction house where she used to work, and asks at the reception desk after several of her former co-workers, only to find out that they no longer work there. On her way out, she runs into one of the kids who used to run coffee for the people who did the real work, only now he’s one of the people who do the real work, and he has been promoted to the job of one the guys Becca had come to see (or whose name she had tried to drop—take your pick). Kidman has always done severe facial expression well, and the way she shows shock and then coldness here tells us plainly that it had never even occurred to Becca that anything might still be going on in the real world while she was mourning her son. Though the scene amply demonstrates her affluent smugness, it also shows, I think for the first time, the human being that is buried somewhere under all of that smugness and all of her defense mechanisms.

There are many awkward encounters like this throughout the film, and the path toward healing inevitably winds up leading Howie and Becca further apart than they already are. At bottom, it seems as though they understand that they will eventually be able to go on with their lives, given enough time to process what has happened; but neither of them knows how to get there, and the efforts they make to do things together wind up failing. They retreat into themselves, and they seem to understand what is happening to their marriage as well as they understand that eventually things are going to get better.

Screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire, adapting his own stage play, is wise enough to give Howie and Becca room to expand and contract; and Eckhart and Kidman are skilled enough to fill that space with the urgency of their characters without resorting to histrionics or unnecessary action. Director John Cameron Mitchell, best known for far more outré work, including Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Shortbus, here takes a cue from Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives and allows his characters to fill up his (ahem) interiors and then expand outward as they begin to get through their pain and guilt. Becca and Howie pursue different paths toward getting their lives back together, and sometimes they stray far from where they began; but just as they understand so many other things, though perhaps without being able to express those things, they also understand that their love is the only thing that will get them all the way through the rabbit hole.

Though firmly on course through the first two acts, the film starts to veer toward melodrama in the third act, culminating with the final couple of scenes: a hackneyed, cloying montage, with voice-over, that presents the film’s rather effective conclusion at the same time that it softens all of the hard edges that had made the film so compelling. In a way, it’s sort of impressive that such an ending can be drawn from material that was, at times, fairly harrowing; but it would have been so much more satisfying without the slow-motion and the quiet voice-over and all of those smiles.