“Rabbit Hole” is not the powerhouse drama I was hoping it would be, but it is a special, deeply humane film. Led by Nicole Kidman, the cast is superb. Especially rich are the performances from Kidman herself and the supporting work from Dianne Wiest (when is Wiest not outstanding?) and young newcomer Miles Teller, in his feature-film debut.
The problem is in the direction. Kidman, who produced the film, chose John Cameron Mitchell to direct, which I think was a mistake. Mitchell, the creative force behind the stage musical “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” may understand stage plays, but he appears not to have an instinct for cinema. Kidman’s choice was no doubt guided by the fact that “Rabbit Hole” was originally written as a play. The 2006 Broadway production garnered a raft of Tony nominations, including Best Play, and Cynthia Nixon (of “Sex and the City” fame) won as Best Lead Actress. The play, written by David Lindsay-Abaire, also won the Pulitzer Prize.
It can be quite intimidating for a film producer, especially an inexperienced one like Kidman, to approach material that has won the Pulitzer. This is of course made worse by the fact that almost no filmmaker has ever succeeded in turning a great stage play into a sterling film. (Elia Kazan’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” and Mike Nichols’ “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” are the only two major successes that come to mind.)
Mitchell’s directorial approach involved three steps. 1) Coach the actors brilliantly. 2) Set up cameras and lighting/sound equipment around a sound stage. 3) When the actors are ready, turn the cameras on. This is not cinema. There was an inert quality to “Rabbit Hole” that I couldn’t put my finger on. Then I realized what it was: the camera never moved. Mitchell is not a film director. He’s a stage and cabaret director.
Putting the underwhelming direction aside, “Rabbit Hole” still has much to admire and be moved by. It tries to capture the emotional complexities of putting one’s life back together after a life-shattering tragedy. Here the catastrophe is the accidental death of a toddler. The characters suffering through it are the toddler’s mother (Kidman), father (Aaron Eckhart), grandmother (Wiest), and aunt (Tammy Blanchard). What I particularly like is that Abaire made the tragedy a car accident, allowing him to add a character: the teenage boy (Teller) behind the wheel. The film is at its best when Kidman and Teller begin their impossibly difficult and almost holy process of meeting each other. The generation gap between them only makes this more interesting.
Kidman and Mitchell understood beautifully the power and uniqueness of this material. I wish they had had a better sense of how to use the power of cinema to bring it alive more fully on screen.
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