Digging in the Dirt

Rabbit Hole

***1/2 out of ****

Directed by: John Cameron Mitchell

Starring: Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart, Dianne Wiest, Miles Teller and Sandra Oh

Running time: 92 minutes

Back at the Toronto Film Festival in 2006, John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus received a flurry of controversy for its explicit sexuality. Four years later, he has noticeably scaled back, offering a fragile but exceptionally acted look at a couple who cannot manage to approach foreplay in their own struggling relationship.

Based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play by David Lindsay-Abaire (who also wrote the film’s screenplay), Rabbit Hole tumbles down the icy relationship between Becca (Nicole Kidman, also serving as producer) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart), a young couple in idyllic New York suburbia. But their situation is far from serene; eight months ago, their four-year-old son, Danny, chased the family dog onto the street and was killed when an oncoming car struck him.

The couple turned to grief counseling as a solution, but it has turned off Becca. She wants to mourn quietly, emptying the house of Danny’s things, planting flowers and separating herself from any form of human interaction – save the teenage driver (Miles Teller) who careened while behind the wheel. Howie continues going to “group,” where he befriends another griever (Sandra Oh) and insists on staying cooped up on the couch replaying a video of his son from his cell phone.

Slowly trying to pick up the pieces of normalcy and continue with their lives, Becca and Howie are inflicted by a collapsing marriage – neither are able to muster a few sentences together until they are interrupted by the other’s frustration.

As the tension mounts, the characters become more stormy and their interactions more constricted. Kidman and Eckhart are shatteringly good and unflinchingly honest. When discussing whether or not to move forward and having another child, her glassy stare chills his fiery outburst, and any of the romantic passion bared between the two beforehand is quickly vanquished. (Sex and the City’s Cynthia Nixon and John Slattery, of Mad Men fame, were their counterparts in the New York production, which awarded the former a Tony Award.)

Dianne Wiest also offers a nuanced, sensitive portrayal as Becca’s mother, who is still processing her own son’s suicide and can’t help but try to form connections. She is quickly reprimanded by her daughter who says the two deaths are unrelated.

Don’t mistake Rabbit Hole as an hour-and-a-half excuse to wallow under a weighty sadness, nor as one whose prime mission is to wrap up the sadness in a pretty package. Rather, take it as a moving exploration of people struggling to come to terms with the most emotionally fraught of scenarios and trying to learn how to compose their own sort of strength.

Mitchell directs with a compassionate, restrained touch, aware of the void eating up the characters without veering away from Lindsay-Abaire’s moments of light humour, brittle wit and catharsis. The film is far from a pleasant healing process, but its measured, humane performances make it a tender and powerful one.