Rabbit Hole

Director: John Cameron Mitchell
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart, Dianne Wiest
Time Out rating:

Easily the most gracefully performed grief-porn you’ll see this season, John Cameron Mitchell’s adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire’s play trades in the sort of tragedy that all but guarantees mountains of tissues on multiplex floors. The film initially keeps its weepie cards close to its chest: Why is Nicole Kidman’s suburbanite so disturbed over those symbolically trampled flowers? And what’s up with the old home videos her husband (Aaron Eckhart) watches? Slowly, it’s revealed that they’ve suffered a loss that no amount of sympathy, squash games and Jesus-freak support groups can cure. When Kidman’s benumbed character starts obsessing over a teenage boy, you fear a detour into icky-supernatural Birth territory (is he the now-grown ghost of a child? A potential lover? Or, egads, both?). The reason is simpler, yet no less traumatic.

Mitchell has proved he can do cult-courting camp (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) and sexual-revolutionary salaciousness (Shortbus); now he demonstrates that he can satisfyingly play things straightforward, too. His ace in the Rabbit Hole is Kidman, who – how to say this? – has graciously returned to the world of expressive acting. That she communicates such moving, bruised humanity even when the inevitable gnashing of teeth and let-the-healing-begin histrionics commence in earnest says volumes about her skills – and the narrative limitations of such Kübler-Ross dramas overall.

Rabbit Hole opens at Toho Cinemas Chanter, Yurakucho and Human Trust Shibuya on November 5