Rabbit Hole

Directed by

John Cameron Mitchell

(PG-13)

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Rabbit Hole offers a brilliant example of how cinema can bring “a great, grave theme to indelible dramatic life,” said Richard Corliss in Time. In this adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart play a couple struggling to cope with the death of their 4-year-old son eight months after he was killed by a teen driver. Though the subject of parental loss has been tackled countless times, this dramatization feels so true, “it’s as if previous treatments were failed experiments” and this is “the ‘Eureka!’ moment.” Actually, the original play was far better, said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. John Cameron Mitchell’s conventional, all-too-careful direction doesn’t match the story’s raw emotion. A film about tragedy shouldn’t always be on its “best behavior.” But Mitchell is “smart enough to know that with a subject this charged, you don’t need to oversell the emotion,” said David Ansen in Newsweek. He leaves that up to his actors, and they don’t disappoint. “Kidman’s tightly wound Becca has coiled her sorrow into a knot of rage,” and Eckhart’s work, too, is “nearly faultless.” Deftly, Mitchell and his cast “sidestep sentimentality” and “still wrench your heart.”