DRAMA; 1hr 31min
STARRING: Nicole Kidman, Aaron Eckhart
Lost in grief: Kidman and Eckhart
Eight months is a blink when you’re mourning your dead child. And nothing will protect you from the process: not your gracious home, nor your secure routines, nor even your husband, who can’t discuss your shared loss. That’s how it is for Becca and Howie Corbett (Kidman and Eckhart), whose comfortable life has become a brittle varnish over a ragged chasm. While Howie finds solace in group therapy, Becca is focused on attempting to go forward. Either way, they’re pinned down by the weight of their self-recrimination and sorrow. And when the inevitable explosions erupt, their nakedness is the more terrible for its repression.
Becca is a great, exploratory, undiluted role and a totally attuned Kidman dives directly into her pain, with telling support from Eckhart, Sandra Oh as a bereaved mother, Tammy Blanchard as Becca’s free-and-easy sister, Dianne Wiest as their awkward but well-meaning mother and Miles Teller as the teenager to whom Becca is drawn. Directed by John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) from David Lindsay-Abaire’s adaptation of his stage play, the step-by-baby-step journey never tidies the loose endings or trades on the obvious, allowing grief in all its guises to remain an unsolved mystery.
