class=”alignleft size-thumbnail wp-image-43636″ title=”rabbit hole” src=”https://www.heyuguys.com/images/2010/09/rabbit-hole-220×150.jpg” alt=”” width=”220″ height=”150″ />Rabbit Hole, director John Cameron Mitchell’s third film and his triumphant entry into the mainstream, will undoubtedly be recognised come awards season as one of 2010’s most affecting dramas.
In collaboration with Pulitzer-prize winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire and a cast of A-list talent at the top of their game, Mitchell has crafted a wholly believable, pitch perfect portrait of a tormented couple in the aftermath of a tragedy who struggle with grief and guilt while attempting to keep their marriage intact.
Becca and Howie Corbett (Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart) are a handsome, comfortably middle class couple who lost their four year old son eight months previously when he ran into the street and was hit by a car. As the film opens, one gets the sense of lives in arrest, as the couple’s individual, unsuccessful attempts to grieve and move on leave them floundering and seemingly unable to confront their pain collectively.
Their one overt attempt to deal with grief together, a group for bereaved parents, is an unqualified failure, as Becca can’t abide the group members who seek solace through religious faith and callously calls out one couple about it. Their very attractive suburban home seems to simultaneously hold the pair together and apart, and as much as Howie wants to vocalise his grief and physically reconnect with Becca, she is physically and emotionally withdrawn. Inevitably, this divide leads them to forge connections with others; Howie with a mother from the support group (Sandra Oh), and Becca with the boy who hit their son with his car (excellent newcomer Miles Teller).
While this synopsis quite rightly reads like a startlingly conventional scenario for a director whose last film gained notoriety for its lashings of explicit sex, it is to John Cameron Mitchell’s credit that his first three features all have very distinct and different tones; if he continues on in this vein he will join the UK’s Michael Winterbottom as one of contemporary English language cinema’s more adventurous and restless artists. Nicole Kidman, who produced the film, responded to an audience question at a Q&A following the screening that she liked the very far from obvious Mitchell for the job as she likes passionate risk takers, which he most assuredly is.
Mitchell achieves a flawless tone technically and in the performances of the leads and supporting cast, most notably Dianne Weist in a subtle and moving turn as Becca’s quirky mother which is almost guaranteed to win her a Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. Aaron Eckhart impresses again as the anguished husband who desperately needs his wife to bond with him in grief if he is to heal and move on; Eckhart is an actor of immense scope who moves with ease between roles in extremely commercial fare and deeper, riskier dramas and edgy comedies.
Kidman is also in outstanding form as the frozen Becca, and it’s her turns in great roles like this that remind one how good she can be, her roles in pay cheque dreck like Bewitched and The Stepford Wives notwithstanding. While there are powerful scenes in which the characters’ anguish boils over, the understated collective performance style perfectly conveys the resonant truthfulness of author Lindsay-Abaire’s script; the scenes of emotional fury are all the more powerful and believable because of their scarcity.
The film is not an entirely sombre exercise, and humour emerges naturally and unexpectedly to function as a pressure valve for characters and viewers alike. Lindsay-Abaire has done a masterful job of adapting his play to the screen, and none of the interior or exterior settings feel grafted on to open up the action and relieve the set bound feeling of many theatrical adaptations.
Rabbit Hole does not have a North American distributor as of the time of writing, but it is unlikely that TIFF will end without this engaging and satisfying film having found a supportive home.
