RABBIT HOLE: The Film Babble Blog Review

RABBIT HOLE (Dir. John Cameron Mitchell, 2010)

Married couple Aaron Eckhart and Nicole Kidman are shuffling through the motions of daily life. It's been 8 months since their son was killed - hit by a car - and the lingering pain has yet to recede.

Eckhart thinks group therapy will help with their grief, but Kidman hates what she calls the "God people" in their sessions. Such overly religious folks like the sobbing parent who says of her deceased daughter "God had to take her. He needed another angel."

Kidman dryly can't help but respond: "Why didn't he just make one? I mean, another angel? He's God after all...why didn't he just make another angel?"

Kidman leaves the group after this, but Eckhart returns and makes friends with Sandra Oh as a seemingly more stable group member who has been attending for almost a decade.

Meanwhile Kidman has to contend with a pregnant sister (the acerbic Tammy Blanchard), and their haggard yet still spunky mother (Diane Wiest) who had lost her son to a drug overdose - a comparison to Kidman's loss that she hates her mother to make.

Driving one day, Kidman spots a schoolbus and sees a teenage student that triggers recognition in her. She follows it and sees the student (Miles Teller) get off and enter his suburban home.

Stalking the student becomes a routine until the boy confronts her and we learn that he was the driver of the automobile that killed her son.

Also haunted by the death, Teller is apologetic and shows Kidman a comic book he's working on entitled RABBIT HOLE about parallel universes, time-holes, and alternate realities.

So Eckhart and Kidman don't cheat on each other, but they reach for others for support instead of each other and the film's unforced manner makes it easy to empathize.

It's one of Kidman's sharpest and most piercing performances with Eckhart matching her with some of his most nuanced acting to date. No predictions here, but I expect their names won't be left out in awards season.

Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning play by David Lindsay-Abaire, the inescapable sense of pain is palpable in RABBIT HOLE, but it's not a depressing film.

Director Mitchell's (best known as Hedwig in the cult favorite HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH) naturalistic style and compassion for these characters creates an extremely well constructed and moving film.

More later...

I was telling my brother how much I enjoyed CAPOTE on the AIM and he said something to the effect of “there will be a oscar for the fat faggy”. Such a crude way to speak of the best actor of the Aughts: Phillip Seymour Hoffman. A little respect here bro. Anyway I’m not going to go into plot details or the real life subject matter because 1.) You can read any review to get that stuff and 2.) this movie is more about emotions or lack of them than details. IN COLD BLOOD (1967) was from the killers point of view and romanticized them in Brando fashion while keeping a disturbing point-by-point attention to accuracy. Catherine Keener does a good job as Harper Lee, Chris Cooper is again solid, and Clifton Collins as Perry Smith picks the right note to play all the way down death row.

Now that it is the season for a higher quality supposedly Oscar-worthy fare like CAPOTE, GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK, EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED and THE SQUID AND THE WHALE among others one has to mourn the loss of the all the Deuce Bigalows and movies based on 70’s TV shows. Sigh. They’ll be back next summer I bet.

THE INTERPRETER (Dir. Sydney Pollack)

This came out last summer and failed to make a splash. I watched it on DVD this last week and could see why. Not that it is outright horrible just pretty bad. Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn (once again humorless as Hell) look like movie stars and aren’t convincing as their characters, particularly not with Kidman’s accent or always perfect hair. Catherine Keener as Penn’s Secret Service partner has very little to do. There are so many lamely plotted sequences and laughable conveniences that any element of suspense or actual sentiment is in vain. Pity too.

Pollack has made a number of fine films – a much better political thriller of his was THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975). Honestly though Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway looked like movie stars in that too. Maybe the only thing worth seeing on the DVD is a bonus feature about his choice of the widescreen format over full frame: Sydney Pollack: "I'm making a plea for my colleagues and myself who spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to tell you the story in the best possible way visually and then someone else has to come in and cut the edges off of all of that and pan and scan it so you're not seeing what story we tried to tell you."

Pollack once brought a lawsuit on a Danish TV station for how that pan and scanned one of his films - "mutilated it" he said. To fight to preserve the full visual imagery of one's art is a pretty cool stance - too bad THE INTERPRETER is not.

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