Rabbit Hole. Death and Grief Series — 2

by zencineaste

This review of ‘Rabbit Hole’ is part of the Death and Grief Series. The first film in this series is ‘Failan’, a Korean drama.

Rabbit Hole is the story of Rebecca (Nicole Kidman) and Howie (Aaron Eckhart) who’ve recently lost their four-year-old son Danny, and how they deal with this loss in their own unique ways. It’s about the endless days, weeks and months when everything feels unreal and you’re not sure what it means to be ‘normal’ anymore.

There isn’t much of a story in ‘Rabbit Hole’, it is rather a series of vignettes about Howie and Becca coping with their loss, and thank God for that, because the moment you throw in a story, the focus on grief is sure to be lost. It’s a little bit like Heisenberg’s uncertainly principle.

The film begins with Becca and Howie at a support group for parents who’ve lost their children. There’s a couple that lost their kid 8 years ago and still shows up for therapy. And then there’s a couple that has convinced themselves that their child is in a better place, with God. Becca makes a snappy comment about this and walks out of the group, never to return. Howie still wants to go, and so he goes alone, only to unexpectedly find a pot-smoking partner in Gabby, one half of the couple still grieving for their dead child after 8 years. Gabby’s husband has also decided to miss group and here are two people who instead of going in for therapy, sit in a car smoking joint after joint. That moment when Howie discovers Gabby trying to hide her joint and instead asks her if he can share one, is priceless.

The bulk of the visible strain in Howie and Becca’s marriage arises from the fact that he wants to keep everything that reminds him of Danny whereas she wants to get rid of everything — including the dog that chased Danny onto the street, causing a teenager to run over him and kill him on the spot. And so she does; one day when Howie returns from work, the dog is gone.

When Becca goes to visit her sister, she learns that her sister is pregnant. She has hidden it from Becca because she thought it would be awkward. Becca is surprised at first and quickly comes to terms with it, and even offers Danny’s clothes for the new baby. The sister keeps refusing her offer and when Becca insists, she screams at her saying it would be too weird to see her kid running around in Danny’s clothes.

Becca also gets into a Stockholm syndrome type situation with the teenager Jason who killed Danny. She meets Jason at a park and what begins as an apology session ends on an ‘I’d like to see more of you..’ note. I couldn’t really get into Becca’s head here. She knows Jason didn’t do it on purpose, that it was an accident, but is she trying to find her son in Jason? Grief has a strange way of digging up one’s reserves of compassion — when you’ve lost a child, a lot of petty things that you thought were important, are not so important anymore.

And then there is Howie’s friend who tells him that they can’t go on like this; that they must try to get over it by trying for another child. Howie agrees, but Becca goes ballistic when he mentions this to her. It’s too soon to forget Danny.

One of the most moving scenes in the film is a conversation between Becca and her mother Nat. Nat lost her 30-year-old son to drug overdosing and tells Becca that she knows exactly how she feels, to which Becca slams her saying this is an unfair comparison; Danny was a kid who died in an accident whereas Nat’s son was an addict. My heart went out to Nat – here is a moment where you’re angry at the accusation that your daughter makes against you, as though you were somehow responsible for your son’s overdosing, at the same time you want to comfort your daughter and partake in her grief. The motherly thing to do would be to let your daughter express her rage and be graceful about it; and so the mother does her duty.

The scene ends on a lighter note when Nat recalls an anecdote about an annoying neighbor who would come by everyday after her son’s passing, and didn’t let her be alone even for a day. When it went too far, Nat lashed out at the neighbor that she’s eating all her cookies and would give anything to have her leave. Becca and Nat burst into laughter. And just like that, mother and daughter have made up.

But soon enough, reality sinks in and Becca asks if the pain ever goes away, to which Nat says something poignant that will always stay with me, she says —“No, but it changes. Its like a brick in your pocket at first, weighing you down. Over time you forget its there but when you remember to reach for it, there it is again. At some point it becomes bearable.”

‘Rabbit hole’ is an astonishingly observant portrait of human nature, that captures the seesawing between grief’s bottomless depths and the lighter moments of life that manage to nestle quietly by it, much like the notes and rests on a sheet of music.