Nicole Kidman Tribute: Rabbit Hole (2010)
Sunday, June 23, 2024 at 8:30PM
Cláudio Alves in AFI, Aaron Eckhart, Adaptations, Best Actress, Dianne Wiest, Grief, John Cameron Mitchell, Miles Teller, Nicole Kidman, Oscars (10), Rabbit Hole, Tammy Blanchard

by Cláudio Alves

For a while, I thought that loss would lead to tears, a general sadness that consumes you whole and leaves behind a husk. Much art and media made it seem so to my adolescent self. The piteous melodrama that the mainstream loves to sell was a convincing lie, and so were the beatific visions of bereavement from which a person learns and grows stronger. But life doesn't obey narrative rules, nor does it seek to satisfy in the ways a Hollywood producer might. The tears do come - and they did - but there was more to it. More that wasn't aligned with ideas of beautiful suffering or an education of the soul. When I found grief, I found anger, too.

Why must it hurt so much? Why must it isolate so strongly? Why does it seem like no one understands? Why must joy prevail in the world? It's obscene, it feels wrong, and it stokes the fires of fury inside. Yet, there's no clear target for the flame. You find yourself full of emotion, wanting to wield it like a weapon and hurt something, anything, maybe yourself, or maybe nothing at all. There is no reason in grief and nowhere to go from there. Often, one finds no path out or through, no answers whatsoever. In this solipsism, recognition may lead the way. If not in the company of others, then in the mirror of the screen – in works like that of Nicole Kidman in Rabbit Hole…

From my impassioned words you might suppose John Cameron Mitchell's Rabbit Hole is a great big monument of sorrow with an epic proportion to match its themes. However, it isn't so. At 91 minutes, this adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire's homonymous play is remarkably brief and fleet-footed. Indeed, you have to go back to 1983's Testament to find a shorter Best Actress-nominated film. It's a wisp of a thing, pondering the aftermath of tragedy through sketched observations that never coalesce into a story proper. It's a snapshot of what comes next, when something unimaginable happens for which there's no right or wrong reaction. 

One could call it a character study with little interest in what exists beyond its leads' interiority, and even then, our access is partial. It's a limited scope, though not reductive as one might uncharitably suppose. Take the first few moments as a proof of concept and guide into the personalities at hand. As played by Nicole Kidman, Rebecca "Becca" Corbett appears to us in her garden, meticulously planting flower beds with a look of single-minded concentration that almost looks like it hurts. Only when the work is done does her visage soften, erstwhile sharpness giving in to contemplation. A note of melancholy reverberates through the screen, but not too much.

Next comes a neighborly intromission that shows the cracks in her placidity. Confronted by unwelcome kindness, Becca seems at odds and profoundly uncomfortable. The fragile flowers have her attention captive, so when the other woman steps on them by accident, you can practically feel the pull of the sinew and tendons tensing around Kidman's face. She misdirects and lies, guaranteeing a quiet night at home with her husband, Howie. Though, when he arrives, we're witness to another uncomfortable pas de deux. Together, the spouses chase the ghost of a past harmony, some bliss they've lost and can never retrieve, no matter how much they might pretend otherwise.

He might put up a better act, going for the performative joviality that only highlights the hollowness in his gesture. Becca is much less of a team player. She doesn't wallow, but neither does she believe the charade of normalcy or sustain its lie. Better be impassive, disconnected, and unmoored from each other. After all, that's the only thing that comes naturally to her at a moment when saying she's fine is the easy way out but so preposterous as to be comical. It makes for a curious character introduction, so disengaged it's almost daring you to leave this woman behind, do as she does, and repudiate the very idea of communion – between man and wife or the star and her audience.


A call from the cops to bail out her pregnant sister, a glimpse into her husband's nocturnal rituals, and, most importantly, a group therapy session eventually spell out the context for these people's sad state. Eight months ago, Becca and Howie's four-year-old son, Danny, was killed in a car accident witnessed first-hand by his mother. Rather than crush her, the tragedy seems to have fortified the woman's resolve to feel nothing – or maybe feel everything others are telling her to process and let go. Through a performance that teeters on the knife's edge between flintiness and the ardor of an open wound, Kidman allows both possibilities.


Sometimes, she pulls it off in one swift motion or line reading as when Becca rouses against another couple's religious reasonings. She's not one to tolerate talks of little angels up in heaven, breaking through the teary mood with words that might have sounded more reasonable in her head. Kidman goes full-steam ahead with blunt ironies, shattering the collective surrender to self-pity. Still, she stops herself short of unashamed monstrosity. Becca is keenly aware of how she's being received, especially by her husband, so she throws a balm on her acid tongue. Even if she's obstinate, the awkwardness of lapsed normalcy prevails.


Later, when talking with her mother on the phone, Becca will throw a jab meant to destabilize the other woman who's just trying to help. Kidman again delivers the venom with remarkable directness, but quickly recoils as if the sound of it stings Becca's ears. The only person she won't accommodate is her husband, whom she'll fight in open domestic battle. In such cases, Kidman doesn't apologize, either with words or looks. If anything, that ironic edge returns, as when an attempt at intimacy summons suspicions that Howie yearns for another child or his reluctance to do like Becca and give up every material reminder of Danny. 

But then a silent beat, a look away. Suddenly, the fight dies in their bodies, and they both find themselves too tired to continue. It feels almost too real, too recognizable, too much honesty in a marriage story that's gone to ruin before we ever caught sight of it. That being said, one costar brings the very best out of Kidman, and it's neither Aaron Eckhart's Howie, Dianne Wiest's maternal albatross, nor even the spiky-spirited presence of Tammy Blanchard as the expecting sister. Instead, it's Miles Teller who has never been better than here, playing another soul forever entwined with the memory of Danny.

He's Jason, the teenager driving the car on that fateful day and whom Becca pursues after a random sighting on the road. One would expect hysterics when they meet for actual conversation, perchance a final form of Becca's dormant rage or an expression of sorrow meant to milk the audience for all their tears. But of course, Nicole Kidman isn't a prominent actress and, despite all the conventionality in Mitchell's direction, he's not interested in resolving the mystery of grief. They keep it beyond comprehension, an enigma that doesn't make the character of Becca into a puzzle, and neither does it give instructions on how to solve her. 

Once more, this walking contradiction refuses the sentence of inscrutability, and Kidman adds another shade to Becca's relationship with the gaping hole throbbing at the center of her spirit. Against all odds, she's at peace in Jason's company. Moreover, she's inquisitive, genuinely interested in his art, his self, his connection to what happened to them both. The actress plays with formidable restraint in their interactions as she does throughout the whole film, opting for a whispered meaning rather than shouted messaging. If anything, she's saving her sobs for a pivotal moment when a mother without a son glimpses the rites of passage her boy will never live through.

The use of flashbacks and slow-motion gild the lily a tad, but Kidman is so raw that she transcends the needless devices, aiming Becca's sudden demonstrativeness at the audience like a cannonball in the battlefield of cinema. Brilliantly, hands reach for her contracting neck and veiny forehead as if trying to settle the expression or, in physical shock over what just erupted from within. In contrast, Kidman's other major triumph is the exact opposite of that scene. Rather than showing what's inside, the Australian thespian allows Becca to get lost in the abyss of herself. This mostly happens when Mitchell's camera finds his leading lady alone, acting out domestic tableaux in an empty house.

Her body still seems calibrated for the laborious business of being the mother to a small child. Without that to spend her energy and fill her day, Becca often seems at odds with her homemaking routine. The frame tends to consider her in expectant pose, standing ramrod straight, waiting for something to happen that never does. A coiled spring, she's full of stored energy waiting for release, a force going to waste in the liminal space of a home that no longer feels like one. Rather than providing an undercurrent of buzz to the performance, these physical details deaden it to formidable effect.

There's a corrosive quality to her stillness, and how it can often transition into a restlessness without purpose. These disquieting notions almost go against whatever tension Kidman brings out in Becca's broken attempts at communicating with others. Mind you, it's not a fault, but the sort of counterintuitive yet genius conflagration of signs and actorly choices that do justice to the character's psychological truth. It's the sort of thing that marks Nicole Kidman as one of our greatest silver screen thespians. Needless to say, her Rabbit Hole turn deserves its Oscar honors and then some. Depending on the day, I might even rank it as her best nominated performance.

Previously in the Nicole Kidman TFE Tribute: 

 

The Nicole Kidman TFE Tribute is inching closer to its end. As we delve into the star's 2010s output, you can expect some comedy – both adult and kid-friendly – award-winning prestige TV, and more auteur lust.

Article originally appeared on The Film Experience (http://thefilmexperience.net/).
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