It seems that Rabbit Hole mostly exists to be an honest look at what people really think and what they’re really going through when they experience the outrageously traumatic experience of losing a young child. But the main reaction I had while watching this movie wasn’t that it was honest, but that it was exaggerated for the sake of drama. Has Nicole Kidman ever had a role in any movie where she wasn’t playing a completely frigid shrew? Her character is completely contemptible in this movie, and she’s supposed to challenge me, make me think about how I would behave in the same situation, but mostly what she does is just make me fantasize about strangling her. At one point she completely randomly smacks a woman in a grocery store. It’s a very dramatic scene, and when another character explains to the smacked woman that Nicole Kidman is acting up because she has recently lost a child the woman responds by saying, “I don’t care.” This was maybe the only honest moment in this film for me, I didn’t care either.
I’ve known people who have been through horrible things, people who have gotten through unimaginable experiences, there’s a period of manic behavior to get through, sure; but I’ve never seen anybody gleefully lash out at everything around them like the characters in this film do. Aaron Eckhart plays the husband, and for the fist half of the film he acts as the voice of reason trying to pull Kidman back from her angry perch, but in the second half of the film even he gives in to the destructive behavior of his wife and starts senselessly lashing out at people. What was I to take from all of this? There are a few pockets of humanity in this movie, mostly when Eckhart’s character bonds with another woman (Sandra Oh) and Kidman strangely obsesses over a teenage boy (Miles Teller), but the rest of it is a torture chamber of watching people respond unhealthily to adversity. I never felt like this was real people dealing with a real tragedy, but instead it always felt like I was watching a movie about manufactured tragedy that was supposed to make me rub my hands together and lick my chops at all of the delicious schadenfreude. The manipulation was presented with a deft enough hand that I didn’t completely hate what I watched though, so I’ll rate this one somewhere in the middle.
