Becca Corbett (Nicole Kidman) is in the basement with her mother, Nat (Diane Wiest), staring at a mound of toys that once belonged to her four year-old son, Danny, who died in a car accident. Eleven years ago, Nat lost her son, Becca’s brother, to a drug overdose. The difference in age doesn’t matter, Nat once told Becca. “I was still his mother.”
“Does it ever go away?” she asks Nat.
“No…it changes, though.”
Becca persists, “How?”
Nat pauses. “At some point it becomes bearable. It turns into something you can crawl out from under, and carry around—like a brick in your pocket. And you forget it every once in a while, but then you reach in for whatever reason and there it is: `Oh right. That.’”
The Rabbit Hole, based on David Lindsay-Abaire’s 2005 play, is a curious choice for a Christmas release. It’s not a feel good movie, tackling the death of a child, a theme that many fans avoid like the plague. But it’s a story that will stay with you long after the credits have run.
As the film opens, Becca is seen planting flowers in her Larchmont backyard. When her neighbor accidentally steps on a bloom, Becca flinches. Her world is spinning out of control. She couldn’t protect her son; she can’t even protect a flower. Kidman’s Becca resembles a limp rag doll, her lank hair pulled back, dull dresses skimming her thin frame. Reminders of her son, whether art projects tacked on the wall or a child’s seat in the car, are removed, their presence too painful. In contrast, her husband, Howie (Aaron Eckhardt), soothes himself by replaying on his phone a video of his son.
The Corbetts have no outlet for their anguish. They attend a grief session, meeting another couple that has been coming for eight years. The thought that the mourning period can last that long unsettles Becca. When one mother characterizes the death of her child as “God’s will,” Becca has had enough. Howie makes an attempt to keep attending, but soon he and another mother, played by Sandra Oh, deal with their grief by smoking pot in her car and going to arcades.
Becca has secret meetings, too, with the high school student, Jason (Miles Teller), who was driving the car that killed Danny. The Corbetts have never blamed him (Danny had darted into the street to chase the family dog), but have never talked with him at length. Becca begins to find comfort spending time with a young man whose life also was changed by the tragedy. Jason shows Becca what he has been working on, a comic book, The Rabbit Hole, dealing with parallel universes.
“So somewhere out there, there’s a version of me—what?—making pancakes?…So this is just the sad version of us….Well, that’s a nice thought. That somewhere out there I’m having a good time.”
Will good times return? There is hope by the end of the film. But keeping Nat’s earlier comments in mind, we know that the brick in the pocket will still be there as a reminder. And as Nat says, “…it’s what you have instead of your son, so you don’t want to let it go either.”
