Rebecca "Becca" Corbett and Howard "Howie" Corbett's four-year-old son Danny is killed in a car accident when he runs out into the street after his dog. Eight months on, Becca wants to give away Danny's clothes, remove Danny's things, and sell their house. Howie is angry at Becca's elimination of anything that reminds them of their child. Becca assumes Howie wants to have another child, but she refuses.
Becca's mother, Nat, has also lost a son, Arthur (Becca's brother), who died of a drug overdose in his 30s. Becca states the two deaths are different situations, and thus not comparable. Becca's sister Izzy is pregnant, and Becca keeps giving Izzy passive-aggressive advice about becoming a mother, which Izzy resents.
Becca and Howie attend group therapy, where Becca is irritated by some of the other members – particularly by one couple who attribute their own child's death to "God's will". Becca stops going to therapy, while Howie continues to attend the meetings without Becca. Meanwhile, long-time member Gabby starts coming to group alone, telling Howie that her husband also refuses to come to group therapy. One night, he sees her high in her car, and asks to join her. They both start smoking pot in her car before the group therapy meetings. Eventually, they ditch meetings in favour of going to do things like bowling, where they almost begin an affair. However, Howie pulls away, stating that he is in love with his wife.
Meanwhile, Becca starts meeting with Jason, the teenage driver of the car that hit Danny. She discovers he feels guilty and tells him she does not blame him for the accident. Jason tells her about a comic book he is writing called Rabbit Hole, which is about parallel universes. She asks to see it, and he tells her that she can see it when he is finished.
Becca and Howie put their house on the market. The day of the open house, Howie decides to stay at the home for it. During the open house, he is in Danny's bedroom with an interested couple, who ask about his son. He tells them that his son died and they react awkwardly. After the open house, Jason brings his finished comic book to Becca and walks in unannounced through the door, which is still open from the open house. As Jason gives Becca the book, Howie realises who he is and gets angry. Becca tells Howie she has been meeting Jason. Howie is angered by this and demands that Jason leave immediately. Jason complies.
Becca and Jason meet again, and talk about the content of the comic book – parallel lives. She realises that at this moment, she is living her "sad" self. There are many other versions of her that exist in other ways, and are not consumed by grief. Howie and Becca begin to have new activities, such as bowling and playing games, and they start to accept their son's death. Becca also comes to realize that her grief is like her mother's, in that it will never end.
Howie and Becca decide to have a garden lunch. The scene begins with Howie telling Becca how the lunch would take place, subtly and incrementally interacting with a small group of trusted friends while life begins to feel normal again. Simultaneously, the screen fades into the lunch as Howie continues to speak in the background. The film ends with Becca and Howie sitting in their garden alone, after all their guests have left, staring into space. Becca reaches out to Howie and touches his hand. They hold hands affectionately as they continue to sit and stare into space.
Rabbit Hole was filmed primarily in the Douglaston neighborhood of the borough of Queens, New York City.[4] The $3.2 million production had a 28-day shoot.[4]
Rabbit Holepremiered at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival in September 2010, then played at three other film festivals (Mill Valley Film Festival in October, and both Denver Film Festival, and Rome Film Festival in November). The film opened in Canada and the United States on December 17, 2010 in a limited release in 5 theaters and grossed $53,778 averaging $10,756 per theater and ranking 38th at the box office. The widest release domestically for the film was 131 theaters and it ended up earning $2,229,058 in the U.S. and $2,914,096 internationally for a total of $5,143,154.[9][10]
Reception
Rabbit Hole received positive reviews and has a rating of 87% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 201 reviews with an average score of 7.60/10. The consensus states: "It's often painful to watch, but Rabbit Hole's finely written script and convincing performances make it worth the effort."[11] The film also has a score of 76 out of 100 on Metacritic based on 39 reviews.[12]
Festival and other advance showings of the film garnered good reviews, particularly for Kidman and Wiest. The film received a standing ovation at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival.[13] Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter said: "Kidman grabs the central focus of the story as the more distraught of the two. The performance is riveting because she essentially plays the entire film at two levels, the surface everyday life and then what is turning over and over again in her mind."[14] Peter Debruge of Variety found it "a refreshingly positive-minded take on cinema's ultimate downer: overcoming the death of a child", and called it "[a]adroitly expanded" from the stage play, "with Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart delivering expert, understated performances".[15]Roger Ebert gave it 3.5 stars out of four, calling it "... entertaining and surprisingly amusing, under the circumstances. The film is in a better state of mind than its characters. Its humor comes, as the best humor does, from an acute observation of human nature. We have known people something like this. We smile in recognition. Apart from anything else, Rabbit Hole is a technical challenge. It is simple enough to cover the events in the story, not so simple to modulate them for humor and even warmth. I knew what the movie would be about, but I was impressed by how it was about it."[16]
The play has a cast of five roles, while a few other characters such as Gabby are only mentioned in dialogue. In contrast, the film has a cast of over a dozen actors. While the entire play takes place in the home of Becca and Howie, the film has a variety of locations. Past incidents, such as Becca's bad experience in the grief support group, are referred to in the play's dialogue but are depicted on screen in the film.[18][19] The videos that Howie obsesses over are actually seen in the film, though not in the play.[20] The two subplots of Howie's relationship with a woman from the grief support group and Becca's relationship with Jason, the driver of the car that hit Danny, have both been expanded. The film also adds new characters who do not appear in the play: sister Izzy's boyfriend and Howie's best friend.[20]
Jason is an aspiring science fiction writer in the play, but an aspiring comic book artist in the film.[19]
In the opinion of critic Jim Lane, the film is more focused on the husband and wife and less of an ensemble piece. Lane writes
On stage, Rabbit Hole is a tightly focused five-character drama punctuated with sharp, surprising flashes of aching humor. In the movie, however, supporting roles are trimmed into near irrelevance, elbowed into the background by the spotlight focused on Becca and Howie—or, more bluntly, on Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart. Here’s what David Lindsay-Abaire seems not to understand about his own play: It’s like an atom in which the five characters are electrons revolving around the missing nucleus that was Danny.... Without their nucleus, these electrons wobble and flail in their orbits, by turns clutching at and repelling one another.... In the movie, Rabbit Hole's symmetrical stage design is torn between the age-old pitfall of “opening up” a play and the Hollywood urge to focus on Kidman and Eckhart (who are, after all, the stars).....The movie orbits Becca and Howie instead of the lost Danny.[21]
The director of a 2010 stage production of Rabbit Hole, Robert A. Norman, declared: "The 2010 movie version starring Nicole Kidman lacked the humor and hopefulness of the stage script. Our production will have plenty of both of those things."[22] However, Abaire, who wrote both the stage play and screenplay, believes: "For the film, we cut so much that worked in the play that I worried we had cut all the laughs. But there were all these other laughs I didn't know were there."[23]
Nicole Mary Kidman is an American and Australian actress and producer. Known for her work in film and television productions across many genres, she has consistently ranked among the world's highest-paid actresses since the late 1990s. Her accolades include an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Award, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and six Golden Globe Awards. She became the first Australian actor to receive the AFI Life Achievement Award honour in 2024.
To Die For is a 1995 satirical black comedy film directed by Gus Van Sant, and written by Buck Henry based on Joyce Maynard‘s novel of the same name, which in turn was inspired by the story of Pamela Smart. It stars Nicole Kidman, Joaquin Phoenix and Matt Dillon, with Illeana Douglas, Wayne Knight, Casey Affleck, Kurtwood Smith, Dan Hedaya, and Alison Folland in supporting roles. Kidman was nominated for a BAFTA, and won a Golden Globe Award and a Best Actress Award at the 1st Empire Awards for her performance. Her character has been described as suffering from narcissistic personality disorder in the scientific journal BMC Psychiatry.
Aaron Edward Eckhart is an American actor. Born in Cupertino, California, Eckhart moved to the United Kingdom at an early age. He began his acting career by performing in school plays, before moving to Australia for his high school senior year. He left high school without graduating, but earned a diploma through a professional education course, and then graduated from Brigham Young University (BYU) in Provo, Utah, in 1994 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in film.
A rabbit hole is a rabbit burrow.
Rabbit Hole is a play written by David Lindsay-Abaire. It was the recipient of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play premiered on Broadway in 2006, and it has also been produced by regional theatres in cities such as Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The play had its Spanish language premiere in San Juan, Puerto Rico in the Autumn of 2010.
David Lindsay-Abaire is an American playwright, lyricist and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2007 for his play Rabbit Hole, which also earned several Tony Award nominations. Lindsay-Abaire won both the 2023 Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical and Tony Award for Best Original Score for the musical adaptation of his play Kimberly Akimbo.
John M. Slattery Jr. is an American actor and director. He is known for his role as Roger Sterling in the AMC drama series Mad Men (2007–15), for which he was nominated 4 times for a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. For his role he won two Critics' Choice Television Awards and two Screen Actors Guild Awards.
Tammy Blanchard is an American actress. She rose to prominence for her role as teenage Judy Garland in the critically acclaimed television film Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows (2001), for which she received a Golden Globe Award nomination and a Primetime Emmy Award. Her other notable film roles were in The Good Shepherd (2006), Sybil (2007), Into the Woods (2014) and The Invitation (2015).
Michael Doyle is an American actor. He is mainly known for his role on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit as Ryan O'Halloran, Adam Guenzel in Oz, and from 2018 to 2023 on New Amsterdam as Martin McIntyre.
Margot at the Wedding is a 2007 American comedy-drama film written and directed by Noah Baumbach. It stars Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jack Black, John Turturro, and Ciarán Hinds. The film is about the familial storm that arises when Margot, a writer, comes to visit her sister Pauline on the eve of the latter's wedding.
Ewen Leslie is an Australian actor.
John Cameron Mitchell is an American actor, playwright, screenwriter, singer, songwriter, producer and director. He is known as the writer, director and star of the 2001 film Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which is based on the stage musical of the same name. He also portrayed the role of Joe Exotic in the Peacock limited series Joe vs. Carole in 2022.
Just Go With It is a 2011 American romantic comedy film directed by Dennis Dugan, written by Allan Loeb and Timothy Dowling, and produced by Adam Sandler, Jack Giarraputo, and Heather Parry. It is a remake of the 1969 film Cactus Flower, and stars Sandler and Jennifer Aniston. It tells the story of a plastic surgeon who enlists his assistant to help him woo a sixth-grade math teacher.
The 1st Annual Awards.com Movie Awards were held on January 23, 2011. The nominations were announced on January 8, 2011. The results were used by counting how many praises the nominee got on the nominated movie's Metacritic page. The ceremony took place on its home website, the independent database Awards.com.
Miles Teller is an American actor. He made his feature film debut with the independent drama Rabbit Hole (2010), and gained wider recognition for his roles in the coming-of-age film The Spectacular Now (2013) and the Divergent film trilogy (2014–2016). His breakthrough role came in the drama Whiplash (2014) which earned him critical acclaim.
Blossom Films is a production company founded by American-born Australian actress Nicole Kidman in 2010. The first production by the company was the film Rabbit Hole, based on the play of the same name by David Lindsay-Abaire. Their logo features a blossom tree growing.
American-born Australian actress and producer Nicole Kidman has appeared in numerous film and television projects, as well as in theatre productions. She made her film debut in the Australian drama Bush Christmas in 1983. Four years later, she starred in the television miniseries Bangkok Hilton, for which she received the AACTA Award for Best Lead Actress in a Television Drama. Her breakthrough role was as a married woman trapped on a yacht with a murderer in the 1989 thriller Dead Calm. She followed this with her Hollywood debut opposite Tom Cruise in Tony Scott's auto-racing film Days of Thunder (1990). Her role as a homicidal weather forecaster in Gus Van Sant's crime comedy-drama To Die For garnered Kidman a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Comedy or Musical in 1996. She worked with Cruise again on Ron Howard's Far and Away (1992) and Stanley Kubrick's erotic thriller Eyes Wide Shut in 1999.
The Family Fang is a 2015 American comedy-drama film directed by Jason Bateman and written by David Lindsay-Abaire, based on the 2011 novel of the same name by Kevin Wilson. The film stars Bateman, Nicole Kidman, and Christopher Walken. The film was released on April 29, 2016, by Starz Digital.
Simone Zucato is an actress, theater producer, translator and medical doctor.
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