'Rabbit Hole' review: Sad event, stultifying film

Rabbit Hole

Drama. Starring Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart. Directed by John Cameron Mitchell. (PG-13. 90 minutes. Beginning Saturday at Bay Area theaters.)

A young married couple goes from the land of the lucky to the land of the scarred and shattered when their 4-year-old son is killed by a car, right in front of the house. "Rabbit Hole," based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by David Lindsay-Abaire, deals with the aftermath of tragedy, about what happens months down the line, when all the formalities are long over. Everything that can be done has been done, and all that's left is a huge hole where there once was life.

The movie's area of inquiry is essentially undramatic, a tale told in a minor key, but it's sensitive and illuminates areas of experience that usually go unexplored. What happens to the couple, each one grieving separately, each one associating the other with loss? How do friends talk to them? It's easy to console people when you don't think their misfortune is all that bad, but what do you say to somebody experiencing your own worst nightmare? "Rabbit Hole" depicts the isolating nature of grief, a self-isolation that is also, to some degree, community enforced.

As a viewing experience, the film is by turns heartrending and stultifying, but mostly stultifying. Partly, this is a natural consequence of the movie's atmosphere. Inside the house of the grieving parents, played by Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart, everything is steeped in gloom, and it's an effort just to breathe. We are made to understand how, in their misery, they might be tempted to flee such an environment and possibly the marriage. Still, it can't really be director John Cameron Mitchell's intention that the audience should also want to flee - the theater.

The imprimatur of the Pulitzer weighs heavily on the screenplay, in that Lindsay-Abaire, in adapting his work, must have felt a responsibility to change as little as possible. But, alas, there is something very literalizing about cinema that works to this material's detriment. What onstage seemed emblematic becomes specific. What onstage seemed to be happening over there to those people feels as though it's happening in the same room with us. And - this is particularly curious - what felt like a climax in the play feels like a non-event onscreen, more an ellipsis than an ending.