Rabbit Hole

The Saturday sky was gloomy.  I sought solace in something darker than the sky. I immersed myself in the complete darkness of a movie theatre. I found myself in a sunny California suburban home. Nicole Kidman was tending some flowers in her garden. She rejected her neighbor's gingerly last minute invitation just across the garden fence for another one of her neighbor's cook out for her family and friends. She had to attend a support group meeting that evening.

It was a film adapted David Lindsay-Abaire from his own Pulitzer prize winning Broadway play of the same name, directed by John Cameron Mitchell and starring Nicole Kidman as Becca Corbett, Aaron Eckhart as her husband Howie Corbett, Dianne Wiest as her mother Nat and Tammy Blanchard as her sister Izzy.

Them we are shown  that Howie returns home from work to find his wife cooking something before the oven. He approaches her from behind and wishes to be intimate. She says she is not in the mood. The husband goes to a corner to sulk and was watching a black and white video on on a small I-pad. We are next shown the couple attending a support group meeting in which an Latin couple was reminiscing how they missed their lost son after 8 years saying that perhaps God wanted him as an angel and took him. Becca bursts out saying that if God wanted an angel, he could certainly make one. Everybody was surprised. The Corbetts excused themselves and left. Becca never returned but Howie did.

We're next shown Izzy coming to visit Becca. They chit chatted. It was obvious that Izzy was trying to pick up men at bars and later got into trouble in a brawl with another woman and Becca had to bail her out. She is unrepentent and said the other woman deserved her punches and later announced that she was pregnant. Becca brought her some clothes of Danny, the son of 4 she lost 8 months ago, saying that her sister could save several hundred dollars but Izzy said she was not sure if it was a boy. Nat said that it was likely that Izzy might have a girl. Nat left with the clothes she brought and threw them into a garbage dump. Becca sees a child on a supermarket trolley whining for a three dollar chocalate bar at a supermarket and the child's mother resolutely refusing to let him have it. She couldn't control herself and told the mother to make the child happy. To be expected, she was told to mind her own business but when challenged whether she had a child, she could no longer control herself and slapped the woman, stunned into instant silence.

Next we are shown Becca trailing a teenage boy in a school bus, followed him to a public library, and read the book he just returned. It was called Parallel Universe by Alan Guth, a physicist and cosmologist. She tried to go to Sotheby's to meet old acquaintances but was told that all her old colleagues had gone. In the meantime, she continued to track the teenage boy and finally caught him playing truant. They got talking in a nearby park We learned that he was the driver of the car who knocked down her son Danny, whilst the latter was chasing their dog in the street. He admitted that he might have been driving a little too fast. She said she did not want to blame him and that it was just an accident. There were tears in their eyes in the silence.She learned that he was drawing a half finished comic about a parallel universe in which a father might meet his dead son in another universe through a "rabbit hole" in the universe or what some scientists called "worm holes" in the universe through which one may burrow down inside further and further until one emerges into another universe where the outcome of what actullay happened on our earth might be regarded as only one of a number of possible alternative versions, rather like the rabbit holes of C. S Lewis' Alice in Wonderland.  He promised that when it was finished, he would show it to her. 

In the meantime, we are shown that Howie also lost interest in the support group, took back the Danny's dog from Nat's house, was angry at it and then felt sorry that he was. It was obvious that the dog was the only living reminder of the Danny he lost. He began to take pot with another female member whose husband had left her and nearly had an affair with her but pulled back at the last minute when she was waiting for him at the doorsteps of her house. He returned home and found the boy just entering his house which he had finally decided to sell at the insistence of  Becca, who did not wish to be further reminded of her losss. Howie was surprised, angry and suspicious how well it appeared they knew each other. Becca tried to explain that it was not what he thought and explained what the comic story was all about. He finally understood that that was Becca's way of effecting the closure to the grief caused by the loss of their son. When the film ends, we are shown the couple sitting facing the spectators with her hand reaching for his, caressing it with an expression of silent tenderness.

It was a simple film of how different people cope with loss of their son. Howie needed external emotional support. Some people relied on God. Becca wanted to deal with it her own way, with anger, with finding out what caused Danny's death and the personality of the person who killed her son. Her connection with Danny was paradoxically through understanding that killer whom she found to be just a talented high school senior about to enter Connecticut College to do astrophysics. There was a scene in which Nat and Becca was talking to each other as they were putting away the clothes and toys of Danny into the cellar of Becca's house because once prospective buyers saw all those toys of Danny's room and learned that he was dead, they instantly lost all further interest in buying their house. Nat said that when she lost her 29 year old son Arthur, a drug addict, she felt that no matter how rotten he was, he was still her son and somehow he could never completely disappear from her mind but that with time, it became bearable and that her memories of him, might even at times be good, instead of being painful. It had become part of her life.  

It was an excellent film. I like it that the director never overplayed anything: no moral preaching,  no platitudes, no easy religious "solutions", no excessive display of emotions. Everything quietly done, with all the normal anger, embarrassment, attachment to the memories, objects associated with lost ones, refusal to believe that he is gone, the occasional pangs, the desire to start afresh and the difficulties of doing so, the displacement of one's anger on to people around them and even on to thier mates, relatives and friends, the trivial marital tensions, the desire to escape into drugs, sports or to start new and hopefully more satisfying emotional relationships etc. and finally its resolution through acceptance understanding and love.

Nicole Kidman was excellent as Becca. She shows, the ostensible indifference, cool, occasional embarrassment, quiet pain etc so well she has been nominated for an Oscar as the best actress for her role in this film. Dianne Wiest is equally good as her mother: the anxiety not to offend and yet motherly undersanding of the pains of her daughter etc. It proves once again what a good script can do with some good acting. A well spent one hour and 32 minutes!

 

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