Rabbit Hole (2010)

Rabbit Hole arrives with a title that suggests whimsy and delivers, instead, eight months of unrelenting grief. Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart play a couple whose four-year-old son has been killed by a car, and John Cameron Mitchell directs their slow unraveling with the patience of someone who trusts silence. There is no thesis here, no lesson appended to the suffering. The film simply watches two people fail to comfort each other in a house full of a dead child's belongings. It is a drama about loss, and it declines to make that loss mean anything larger than itself.

The supporting cast includes Sandra Oh, Giancarlo Esposito, and Dianne Wiest, and none of them are present to illustrate a point about representation. They are present because the play had people in it. David Lindsay-Abaire adapted his own stage work, expanding the group therapy sessions and the subplot involving the teenager who was driving the car, and the additions serve the story rather than a checklist. When Becca slaps a stranger in a grocery store, the moment is about a woman coming apart, not about a system. The film has no interest in diagnosing society. It has one interest, which is the inside of a marriage after the worst thing happens.

So we arrive at the classification, and it is a clean sweep of zeroes. No identity-conscious casting, no ideological critique of wealth or power, no environmental sermon, no lecture waiting at the end of the third act. What remains is craft. Kidman was nominated for an Academy Award for this, and the nomination was earned the old fashioned way, through close-ups and restraint. Some films are so eager to instruct that they forget to be films. This one remembers. It is a quiet, painful, well made piece of work about people, and for that it earns our complete indifference on every metric that matters to this ledger.