Rabbit Hole

Rabbit Hole

Directed by John Cameron Mitchell

Runtime: 92 min.

Nicole Kidman gives her most thoughtful and convincing performance in Rabbit Hole. Unlike the hysterics and British accent of her Oscar-winning role in The Hours, Kidman settles into the misery and prickliness of Becca, a young Connecticut housewife still mourning the accidental death of her toddler son. Even the sexual unease that overwhelms Becca’s relationship with her grieving husband Howie (Aaron Eckhart) comes across as a natural strain. Kidman achieves a simplicity she especially didn’t have in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.

This advance deserves recognition considering Kidman’s usually fatuous art-movie stunts (Fur, Moulin Rouge, The Invasion). This time she gets it right. Even as a producer, her choice of John Cameron Mitchell as director shows good taste. She appreciated that Mitchell’s suddenly forgotten Shortbus was one of the most sensitively conceived movies about our modern condition—a deceptively intelligent non-stop erotic cabaret made outstanding by its bevy of accomplished performances. Mitchell finds honesty and subtlety in his actors, which distinguishes Rabbit Hole’s melodrama from the Oscar-baiting suburban angst of Little Children.

For Mitchell, Rabbit Hole continues Shortbus’ observation of contemporary stress; that post-9/11 realization of trauma that won’t easily heal. It seems the real lesson of Mitchell’s first film Hedwig and the Angry Inch is to avoid the subjectivity that aggrieved and damaged people can easily slip into. He’s gotten past wallowing in pathology, a tendency that blinkers many filmmakers— especially those who deal with gay experience. Mitchell brings a little too much sensitivity to the heterosexual panic of David Lindsay-Abaire’s original stage play Rabbit Hole. Even the guiltridden high school boy Jason (Miles Teller), who Becca anxiously reaches out to, works through his trauma: He pours his frustrations into a comic book, an art project like that in Shortbus.

Rabbit Hole is a laudable art project, not great but good enough to rate comparison with stronger movies that contextualize the grief of loss and disorientation. Catherine Deneuve’s deranged parent in Après Lui was a more powerful mourner, but Kidman echoes similar pain. (Kidman’s rigid forehead lessens the impact; it’s an unfortunate defect next to Dianne Wiest’s open-faced struggling with grief and faith as Becca’s mother—a beautifully realistic portrait.) Howie’s sorrowful obsession with videos of his dead son recalls Tom Cruise’s video-mourning in Minority Report, the most heartbreaking allegory for the new millennium’s sense of loss. “Things aren’t nice anymore,” Becca snaps as she becomes distant from her husband, sister and mother. It’s subtle and devastating enough to describe the post-9/11 era.