The media tells the story that when a married couple experiences the death of a child, the marriage cannot withstand that grief, resulting in a divorce rate of somewhere near 70% for couples in this situation. That makes a lot of sense when you think about it, because each of us grieves a loss in our own way; it would be difficult for a couple to grieve together in the same way and keep that unity intact.
In reality, however, the divorce rate of couples who experience the death of a child is under 20%. For this and many other reasons, David Lindsay-Abaire’s play-and-now-movie, RABBIT HOLE, is a stunning, raw and real piece of theatre, a transparent look at marriage and grief as it really is, not how it’s portrayed in the media.
The film version of RABBIT HOLE stars Nicole Kidman as Becca and Aaron Eckhart as her husband, Howie. The are only eight months removed from the day when their 4-year-old son chased the family dog out of the yard and into the street, where he was stuck by a teenage driver and died.
Becca and Howie do what they are supposed to do in their attempts to deal with their soul-crushing despair. They attend group therapy sessions for couples who have lost children, but Becca is incensed by the “God thing” and freaked out by couples who have been attending meetings for close to a decade. Howie returns to work and old schedule, an attempt at normalcy. Becca tries to be happy for her wayward sister who is suddenly pregnant, and tries to stay quiet when her mother, bless her heart, offers her advice about how to deal with the grief.
But what is most evident is that Becca and Howie have their own very different ways of dealing with the loss of their son, and the conflict of RABBIT HOLE, which is beautifully staged by director John Cameron Mitchell and acted by Kidman and Eckhart, is that their individual needs are driving a wedge of distance and silence between them. Becca starts to take all of the pictures their son drew down from the fridge and launders his clothes to remove his smell from them. She bags them up and gives them away. Howie, on the other hand, doesn’t want to touch anything in the boy’s room. In the middle of the night, he’s fiddling with his iPhone or the old camcorder, rewatching video footage of a then-whole family. He keeps going to therapy even after Becca stops. In large part, their needs and desires are at complete odds with one another.
The conflict and interest escalates when Becca begins to follow the whereabouts of the teenager who struck their son. She ends up befriending him, though befriending is probably not the right word. Howie, meanwhile, befriends a woman from group therapy whose marriage goes the way of that fabled majority. That woman offers Howie the intimacy his wife says she can’t, but Howie will not accept it out of devotion to his partner-in-grief.
I cannot accurately express how moved I was when I first read Lindsay-Abaire’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play and then saw it performed at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 2007. I was so stunned with not only the depth of this couple’s despair, but the undeniable honesty, humanity, and even humor the play possessed. So I was nervous about seeing the film version.
Fortunately, and probably because the playwright maintained possession of his own work for the screen adaptation, the film retains the bulk of the original play. Working in the new conventions of film, it takes some of the moments that were only conversations in the play—such as an incident where Becca lashes out at a mom in the grocery story who won’t buy her kid some fruit snacks—and literally presents them here. Those changes are to be expected, and most of them work okay.
There is something small lacking for me in this film version of RABBIT HOLE, though. And while I couldn’t quite put my finger on it at first, I think I know what it is.
In the play, all of the action takes place in that house—the place where their son’s memory looms and where every item therein contains a memory of him. The conversations between characters in the play, such as the aforementioned example of Becca’s anger at a mom at the store, are told around the kitchen table in the play; the manner in which they are told serve to deepen our understanding of those characters almost more than actually witnessing the events do. The teen boy responsible for the accident shows up at their house in the play, not in a neutral park as he does here in the film (until the end, anyway). That, for me, adds another element of depth that isn’t duplicated here.
Staging the entire work inside the family house spoke volumes for how Becca is trapped after her son dies. Howie comes and goes, but she’s stuck there. It’s hard for a film to stay that visually static, and this one doesn’t even attempt to. That’s understandable, but it deflates the emotion a little bit. And for a while there, I worried that Mitchell and Lindsay-Abaire were going to take Howie too far down a different path from the original work, though I’m happy to say this doesn’t happen.
One thing that is absolutely wonderful in this filmed version of the play is the acting. I dare say that this is the finest work of Nicole Kidman’s career. Yes, she won an Oscar for disappearing under a prosthetic nose in “The Hours,” but here she is more vulnerable, raw, and even funny than I have ever seen her. I expect her to contend for the big awards for this performance, and it’s a bit of a shame that her work won’t be flashy enough in this year of outstanding work to earn her a second Oscar, but she’d be deserving.
She’s so unbelievably good in RABBIT HOLE, in fact, that it’d be easy to overlook Aaron Eckhart. I’ve even read a few reviews that said that he was bad and that Kidman blows him off the screen. I think that’s unfair, and not even accurate. In fact, the real tragedy is that Eckhart will get overlooked for what I feel is maybe his best work, too. Howie’s pain and journey are every bit as real as Becca’s; they’re just different. The two of them together are fantastic.
Equally fantastic is the always wonderful Dianne Wiest as Becca’s mother, who mines a little bit of her work in “Parenthood” here but is less of a pin cushion. As a mother who has lost a son herself, Wiest conveys the confusion of a woman who can’t understand that what happened to her doesn’t translate directly to what is happening to her daughter. Some of the best words of wisdom in the play come during a scene in this film version when Becca asks her mother when the grief goes away.
There is nothing special about Mitchell’s directing, but that is not a negative. Having been so flashy with his indie films “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and “Shortbus,” one might have expected work with far less restraint than this. Most of his choices border on TV movie-ish, but he is right to leave the work to the actors, and directs their performances well.
There is absolutely no doubt that RABBIT HOLE is a sad, sad movie. It’s hard to watch, especially if you are a parent yourself. But it rings so true and is so wise. It is a moving story of the human spirit that doesn’t quite move you on film to the extent that it does on the stage, when those emotions are just that much more raw. But I’m thankful for having a film to remember this wonderful play by.
3.5 out of 4
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