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