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With their intimate scales, intense focus and unadulterated writing and acting, movies based on stage plays are often hot tickets to superior drama. For recent evidence, look to “Closer,” “Doubt,” “Frost/Nixon” and, now, “Rabbit Hole,” the graceful and near-faultless screen rendering of David Lindsay-Abaire’s 2006 Pultizer Prize-winner. Intuitively directed by well-chosen stage vet John Cameron Mitchell (“Hedwig and the Angry Inch”) and adapted by Lindsay-Abaire himself, the film zeros in on a couple grieving the loss of their young son, and manages humor without sacrificing an ounce of wrenching heartbreak.
Nicole Kidman, who also produced, plays the wife and mother, Becca, whose method of coping involves ceaselessly trudging forward with tunnel vision. Never without an objective to distract from her paralyzing inner thoughts, she allows her selfish grief to infect nearly every situation she encounters. Kidman is excellent in the role, her best since ’02’s “The Hours.” She approaches Becca without judgment, baring her flaws while making her deeply sympathetic. Aaron Eckhart is also superb as Becca’s husband, Howie, who by contrast processes the tragedy by clinging to every memory — memories he believes Becca is trying to erase.
The two parents each have an affair, of sorts, to help them learn to live again — without their boy and with each other. At the support group that Becca can’t stand, Howie strikes up a relationship with a longtime attendee (Sandra Oh), while Becca, in the film’s most achingly emotional scenes, befriends a teenager (Miles Teller) coping with his own inner pain. The material takes care to let these connections reach richly satisfying ends, and offers some beautiful surprises along the way.
Mitchell, who also draws a fine supporting turn from Dianne Wiest, displays the same humanistic strengths he put to such wonderful use in “Hedwig” and ’06’s “Shortbus.” He unfortunately lets slip two back-to-back scenes in which Kidman and Eckhart slightly overplay their characters’ shortcomings, but he mainly stages a behaviorally insightful, surprisingly funny and wisely understated snapshot of life as it’s healing. Bravo.
Rabbit Hole
PG-13
Three-and-a-half reels out of four
Now playing at the Ritz 5
Recommended Rental
Catfish
PG-13
Available Tuesday
Not nearly as clever or crucial as it thinks it is, but still worthy of your undivided attention, the secrecy-shrouded, possibly-bogus documentary “Catfish” plays on the fears, and explores the dark corners, of our constant electronic connection. A layered mystery, its surprises aren’t at all what you’re expecting, which is the very best thing to be said about it. SPR
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