Daily Archives: Saturday, July 4, 2015

  • Rabbit Hole

    Old YorkerFilm review

     John Cameron Mitchell (2010)

    Becca Corbett (Nicole Kidman) and her husband Howie (Aaron Eckhart) are in their thirties – affluent, attractive, apparently enviable.   She gave up her job at a big art auction house when their first child Danny was born.   When Danny was four years old, the family dog Taz ran out into the road in front of their house and Danny followed.  A teenage driver swerved to avoid the dog and didn’t see the child coming.  The action in Rabbit Hole begins getting on for a year after Danny’s death.  Becca and Howie are alone in the house now:  Taz, whose presence there Becca finds too upsetting but whose loss Howie would find intolerable, is boarding with Becca’s mother Nat (Dianne Wiest).  Becca’s younger sister Izzy (Tammy Blanchard) and her new boyfriend (Giancarlo Esposito) live with Nat too.  While Izzy has just learned she’s pregnant, Becca and Howie haven’t had sex since Danny’s death.  They go regularly to a support group of bereaved parents but Becca is getting fed up with it.   She’s appalled that one of the couples has been attending for eight years, enraged when another wife resorts to desperate religious justification for the death of her daughter.  (‘God wanted another angel’, says the woman.  Becca snaps back: ‘Then why didn’t He make one?  He’s God, after all.’)   When Howie’s work colleague and friend (Jon Tenney) has tickets for a football (or baseball?) game, it’s a non-starter.  The Corbetts’ evenings usually end with Becca putting down her book and going to bed, leaving Howie to switch on his mobile and watch a video of Danny that he’s copied onto it.

    John Cameron Mitchell, whose two previous features were Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001) and Shortbus (2006), seems a surprising choice to direct this adaptation by David Lindsay-Abaire of his award-winning play, first staged in 2005.  Mitchell does a good, intelligent job, though, and he orchestrates the cast very skilfully.  The acting in Rabbit Hole is meticulous – every gesture, expression, inflection is apt and polished.  Anton Sanko’s score is scrupulously sensitive.  Yet this near-perfection is a big limitation too.  Take, for example, the standout row between Becca and Howie, which is precipitated by her inadvertently deleting the video of Danny from Howie’s phone – even though, as she points out in her defence, they still have a copy of the footage.  These two consciously controlled people, who keep things together largely by keeping them inside, finally let rip and start yelling at each other.  The scene is well played but, except for the crunching weight in Nicole Kidman’s voice on the last word of the line ‘Don’t you think I think about it every day?’, nothing takes you by surprise.  What’s more, the exchange has no rough edges.  Of course the pair interrupt each other but the arc of the row is so carefully built that, once it’s reached its climax, there’s a movement back to normality that’s graceful, and too calibrated.  This neatness distances us from the rampant misery of Becca and Howie’s lives:  that might be a relief but it’s fundamentally wrong when their bereavement, and the fact that it throws everything out of joint, is the movie’s subject.  It’s a mark of the filmmakers’ taste and discretion that the single flashback to the accident in which Danny died is delayed until the very end of Rabbit Hole yet the aestheticising of the moment feels evasive:  we register, just as much as Kidman’s horrified, disbelieving face, the slow-motion rippling of the top she’s wearing.

    David Lindsay-Abaire has developed a screenplay fit for cinematic purpose but there are problems he can’t get round.   In the theatre, you naturally accept events which, outside the theatre, would be unlikely – because the stage is a separate, self-validating world.  So, in a play about a woman whose young son’s death was caused by a local teenager, you accept from the outset that it’s not unlikely the woman and the teenager will meet:  he’s a crucial part of her predicament so they belong in the same theatre space.  On screen, the director and scenarist need to make that meeting happen and a relationship between the two characters develop in the real world.  I don’t know how Becca and Jason come together in the play but what happens in the film is weakly contrived.  Becca, stalled in traffic one day in her car, is alongside a bus.  She sees – almost doesn’t notice at first – a boy sitting on the bus then looks across again.  It’s Jason (Miles Teller), the boy who killed her son.  Next thing, she’s waiting for him at the stop where he gets off the bus; pretty soon, they’re sitting together on a bench talking to each other and they meet to do so regularly.  This might not be a problem if Mitchell and Lindsay-Abaire kept in mind the improbability of the situation but they don’t.  The film obviously needs to get Becca and Jason talking; once it’s manoeuvred them into position, however, it’s as if this coming together is just what you’d naturally expect.

    There are some fine things in Rabbit Hole, nevertheless.  The tensions in Becca’s relationships with her mother and sister are convincingly ingrained:  you feel that Danny’s death has intensified rather than introduced them.  Becca and Nat eventually find common ground but it’s noticeable, and credible, that even after an emotional breakthrough there are no hugs between them:  it’s a touchy, not a touchy-feely, relationship. The film isn’t defeatist but it avoids facile, hopeful resolutions.  Nat has a good speech about how losing a son (an adult son, to drug addiction) felt and feels.  She says (and Dianne Wiest makes you believe this is a thought that’s just occurred to Nat) that the sense of loss is what you have instead of a son, and that the weight of this – like ‘a brick in your pocket’ – seems better than nothing.  The film demonstrates that life goes on, but with great difficulty.  There are developments in Becca and Howie’s grief but the social gathering with their friends and family in the penultimate scene is only a small step.  The final scene has the couple sitting together after their guests have gone, holding hands but both looking straight ahead to the horizon (and the future), wondering what to do next.  The Corbetts’ house must have been too big even when it contained two adults, one child and a large dog.  With the child dead and the dog elsewhere, its emptiness is vast and Becca’s domestic efficiency makes the spotless surfaces all the more soulless.

    Rabbit Hole gets very shaky around halfway.  Becca stops going to the support group; the husband of the group veteran Gabby (Sandra Oh) walks out on her.  It’s a good idea that, on their first evening as solos there, Howie and Gabby smoke a joint in her car before going in to join the others.  But the next scene plays out too crudely when, pleasantly high, they start helplessly giggling at another man in the group who’s grinding on about the ‘rage’ he feels at losing his child.   (Also, the placing of this scene anticipates too neatly Howie’s own rage when he returns home that evening to discover what’s happened to the pictures on his phone.)  When the Corbetts decide to put their property on the market and there’s an open house day, Howie insists on being there to show people round with the realtor.  The sequence builds relentlessly to his revealing what happened to his son – shocking the visiting family, who are enthusing about the bedroom which, unaltered since Danny’s death, appears to be that of a living boy.  It’s hard to tell if we’re meant to think that Howie doesn’t want the house sold and is behaving in a way that ensures it isn’t, or if the sequence is just poorly conceived.   While this is going on, Becca and Izzy are shopping at a supermarket.  Becca intervenes when she hears another shopper refuse her son the sweets he’s after; she ends up slapping the woman, to whom Izzy has to explain and apologise.   This run of bad, point-making scenes culminates in the worst one of all.   Becca and Izzy return home and Howie meets them in the kitchen.  Because it’s still open house, Jason wanders in, to follow up a recent conversation with Becca and Howie is reasonably astonished and incandescent.  This is a gruesome example of how a gathering that’s inevitable on stage can look ridiculous in a naturalistic film.

    The dog Taz is eventually allowed home by Becca, and Howie takes him for walks.  There’s a bit where he gets angry with the dog then regrets his anger and hugs the animal.  This scene too delivers its message loud and clear; fortunately, the dog’s playing isn’t as tidily accomplished as Aaron Eckhart’s so the moment has an emotional freedom and charge absent from other key scenes.  Eckhart is well cast as Howie.  His sleek, sunny looks give an idea of the fun the family had before Danny’s death.  He never quite seems to give himself fully to the role, however – and this is not just a matter of playing a man who’s trying to control his feelings.  But although Eckhart doesn’t generate much emotional power he’s a superb reactor to others, and he’s very skilled in conveying how his character is thinking.  John Slattery played Howie in the New York stage production of Rabbit Hole (Cynthia Nixon was Becca and Tyne Daly was Nat).  Slattery might have brought more tension and layering to the role but I doubt he would have partnered Nicole Kidman as effectively as Eckhart, whose reserve keeps Howie largely in Becca’s shadow.  Kidman gives her finest performance to date.  The bossy, super-competent Becca is forever dishing out ruthlessly authoritative advice or instructions:  the tension between her own thin skin and how much she can wound others through her words is painful.  Kidman’s chilliness works for her here – fused with the character’s, it adds to the pathos of Becca’s situation.

    Miles Teller is admirable as Jason:  his ambivalence about his meetings with Becca – the confusion of guilt, relief and social discomfort – is very persuasive.   The scene when Becca drives over to Jason’s house to see him about to leave with some friends for their high school graduation do isn’t a brilliant idea.  (It’s paired with Howie’s going over to Gabby’s house – and the parts of Rabbit Hole that describe the parallel coping strategies of wife and husband are designed too mechanically.)  The graduation bit gives a good sense, though, of how much Jason’s social life is normal, even if his private thoughts are dominated by the accident.  Dianne Wiest is, again, wonderful – not least in the injection of humour she gives the film.   Nat’s welcoming cheer when she first greets Becca, who calls round unexpectedly, seems entirely spontaneous; as the story develops, we see how willed the cheerfulness is.  Nat doesn’t have a great intellect but she has a larger emotional intelligence than Becca:  she’s puzzled and annoyed that her clever daughter can’t understand other people’s feelings, including her own.   Nat is anxious not to put her foot in it but not always sure how to avoid doing so, until the memorable scene when Becca and she are disposing of Danny’s old toys.  Nat doesn’t want either to be seen making assumptions about what should be chucked out or to sit with idle hands:  she throws things into the cast-offs sack while Becca’s not looking.    Sandra Oh also gives a witty, deeply felt performance.  When Becca defects from the support group and her own husband leaves, Gabby gets friendly with Howie.  You can see she wants to take it further than that.  You can also see in Sandra Oh’s air of yearning resignation that she knows that won’t happen, even when Howie seems to be in two minds about his future with Becca.   Tammy Blanchard is excellent at expressing Izzy’s fraught feelings about her sister: you can feel her resentment of Becca and her awareness that she’s morally compelled to curb it.

    Becca, when she’s virtually stalking Jason, follows him to a library.  He’s returning an overdue book on parallel universes, which Becca then immediately takes out.   Jason has created a comic book that uses a rabbit hole as a portal to parallel universes.  As you might expect, the conversation between him and Becca eventually gets on to speculating whether, in a parallel universe, Danny is still alive and well.  These exchanges, for what they are, are well written and played but the translation of the parallel universes theme to the screen exposes its thinness and, because of the pressure to visualise, underlines it too emphatically.  Becca sits watching some boys, somewhat older than Danny was, playing in a park; we see she’s thinking that might have been him in a few years’ time.  When the camera cuts to the parallel universes book on her lap, it kills the moment.   But at least, except for that awkward kitchen gathering at the end of open house, Rabbit Hole doesn’t expose its theatre origins crudely.  The gradual development of the illustrations for Jason’s comic book, which punctuate the scenes, helps a lot in this respect:  the illustrations are absorbing to look at.

    9 February 2011

     

  • Stoker

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Park Chan-Wook (2013)

    By interesting coincidence, I saw Stoker only a couple of days after seeing Don’t Look Now again.  The jagged style of Roeg’s film is continuously (and, to me, monotonously) disorienting.   With Stoker, the disorientation is caused by the seductive flow and movement of the images:  some of the cuts are more startling because they’re so smooth – and the smoothness contradicts the disturbing nature of what’s on screen.  David Edelstein has written harshly and Anthony Lane dismissively about Stoker but I’m amazed they found it boring:  Park Chan-Wook’s first American movie is one of the most enjoyable new films of recent months.   For the few first minutes, I thought the composition of the images might become tiresome – in fact it becomes fascinating because it’s achieved so effortlessly.  The screenplay by Wentworth Miller (who played the young Coleman Silk in The Human Stain) – centred on a murderous Uncle Charlie and a niece who has to grow up quickly in order to survive him – is clearly indebted to the overrated Shadow of a Doubt, although the obvious similarities to that particular Hitchcock end there.  In Shadow of a Doubt, the niece, Charlotte, is known as Charlie too – the young heroine of Stoker is called India.  In the Hitchcock movie, Uncle Charlie is Charlotte’s mother’s brother and her father, a passionate reader of crime fiction, is very much around.   Stoker begins with the funeral of India’s beloved father, which is where his brother Charlie, just returned from ‘abroad’, makes his reappearance to the family.   India’s widowed mother Evelyn is as keen to sink her teeth sexually into her brother-in-law as he is to deflower his virgin niece.  As those words suggest, the vampiric quality of the relationships is hard to miss but it’s not apparent that Miller’s screenplay connects in any more detail than that to Bram Stoker or his works.  Park Chan-Wook, however, includes several other Hitchcock references – especially to Psycho:  stuffed birds, a swinging light, a pivotal shower scene.  (India’s development from awkward teenager to havoc-wreaking young woman brings Stephen King/Brian De Palma’s Carrie to mind too.)

    The seductive quality of the film-making chimes with Charlie’s insinuation into the lives of Evelyn and India.  Attempting to resist Park Chan-Wook is akin to India’s efforts to deny the effect her uncle is having on her.  You can resist the director’s macabre heartlessness but you’re pulled in – may even be buoyed – by it.  Stoker is suffused with sexual feeling and has two particularly erotic sequences:  Charlie and India’s duet at the piano; and Evelyn’s attempted seduction of Charlie, with ‘Summer Wine’ by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood supplying a glorious accompaniment. The film’s eroticism is strengthened by the absence of any scenes of people actually going to bed together but there’s strong, sometimes disturbing intimacy between different pairings:  India and Charlie; India and her father Richard (in flashbacks); Charlie and Evelyn.  There’s a counteracting distance between the mother (one of the least maternal presences in films of recent years) and her daughter (who always seems more mature than the parent:  they could have been Edina and Saffy in another life).   Some aspects of the plot don’t bear too close inspection.  There’s conveniently little interest in Charlie’s past from those outside the family circle (in the course of the film he reduces the number of people who are in the know about his childhood misdemeanours and lengthy incarceration).  When India discovers a cache of letters Charlie wrote to her from various international ports of call – and which her father kept hidden from his daughter – she’s slow to notice that the back of each envelope is printed with the address of a mental institution.  Wentworth Miller’s screenplay is serviceable, though, and Park Chan-Wook makes the story beguiling:  your awareness of the discrepancy between the quality of the material and the quality of the film-making is part of the fun.

    It took me a while to get used to Mia Wasikowska’s dark hair; by the end of the movie it belonged to her.  India’s father dies on her eighteenth birthday; Wasikowska was twenty-two when the film was shot and at first she seems too old for the role.  Although she conveys India’s childish seriousness and wilfulness strongly, she has to work a bit to do so.  But, as India becomes grown up, Wasikowska’s witty finesse comes into its own.  As he showed recently in Dancing on the Edge, the mostly hollow Stephen Poliakoff serial on BBC2, Matthew Goode has humour to spare and this is used to great effect in the first half of Stoker.  He never forces Charlie’s sinisterness – that he is sinister nevertheless is more worrying because Goode suggests that Charlie is someone who doesn’t take himself too seriously.   Goode’s Charlie isn’t so powerful once he’s fully revealed as a psychopathic killer – but this hardly matters because India, in order to establish her independence, is moving to homicidal centre-stage by this point.  Matthew Goode has great eyes – perhaps the best moment of what he does here comes when he takes the light out of them as Charlie dispatches his Aunt Gwendolyn, who’s well played by Jacki Weaver.  Nicole Kidman’s elaborate self-awareness works for her in this role – her neurotic appetency as Evelyn is really entertaining.  The combination of the faces and characterisations of the three leads – and of Dermot Mulroney as India’s father – makes the generational boundaries between them unusually fluid, enriches the perversity of the film’s sexual soup.   (This is one of several ways in which Stoker would have been less effective if Colin Firth, the original choice for Uncle Charlie, had played the role.)

    The violence is abundant but stylish – and you don’t recoil:  you’re absorbed because you soon realise that Park Chan-Wook will make the images worth looking at.  A few examples:  blood-spattered flowers; the way Charlie breaks the neck of a teenage boy (Alden Ehrenreich); India’s stabbing another boy with a pencil and the subsequent bit involving her and a pencil sharpener.  The rhyming of images is alluring too.  India does a kind of jumping jacks exercise lying on her bed; it’s reprised later in a flashback to the boy Charlie’s movements as he lies atop the mound concealing the younger brother he has just buried alive.  Matthew Goode’s nose strokes Nicole Kidman’s cheek in their final embrace; as India and her father wait in long grass to shoot wild birds,  Dermot Mulroney’s nose passes over the muzzle of his gun (I nearly Freudian-slip-mistyped that as ‘nuzzle’).   India inherits from her father her ability as a crack shot and from her uncle a desire to dispose of people in her own way.  The cinematography is by Chun-Hoon Chung; the music by Clint Mansell sometimes suggests Philip Glass (who, according to Wikipedia, was at one point going to do the film’s score).

    4 March 2013

     

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