“Movie as Therapy”

RABBIT HOLE stars Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart as Becca and Howie Corbett, whose four-year-old son Danny was killed eight months before the movie starts, and so you know it’s not a comedy.

The adaptation from the play of the same name, which won a Pulitzer Prize, is very good, but unfortunately the movie is not.

In fact, you could sum up the story with a simple “Woman loses son offscreen, woman loses husband on-screen, woman gets husband back, they heal.”

Roll credits.

Of course, both Kidman and Eckhart are good in their roles, and Kidman received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for this movie, but just as you have heard of a “one-trick pony,” this is a one-note movie.

The title comes from the title of a comic book created by one of the characters in the story, which deals with parallel universes, and Becca tells him that she likes that idea, because then the one we are in might be “just the sad version of us” and that “somewhere out there, I’m having a good time.”

See? Definitely not the feel-good movie of the year.

Becca lies to a neighbor who invites her and Howie over for dinner, saying they already have plans, when they don’t.

She and Howie haven’t talked at all about having another child, and they haven’t even had sex since Danny died.

She drops out of the group therapy sessions for couples who have lost a child that she and Howie have been attending when the discussions include too much God talk for her taste, especially when one grieving mother says that she takes comfort in believing that her child died because God wanted another angel.

And she starts lying to Howie when she befriends the teenage boy who was responsible for Danny’s death.

On the other hand, Howie is not entirely blameless, either, when the growing distance between Becca and him causes him to consider other ways to heal his grief, without telling Becca.

Becca’s grief causes her to lash out at her mother, played by Diane Wiest, and even her sister, who is planning to get married, but then the subplots feel more like failed attempts to add a couple extra notes to this one-note movie more than anything else.

RABBIT HOLE is pretty much movie as therapy.

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”