Ms. Smarty Pants Know It All

This is the type of movie that I’m used to seeing only with indie treatments nowadays. But, Rabbit Hole actually gets the full on Hollywood-movie glamour, and that makes it a really pleasant surprise.

Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart play a couple who are eight months removed from the accidental death of their son. You probably have a good idea what this means for the movie, and while it doesn’t really hit any radically different ground, the acting and the style of the movie manage to make it work.

The movie does well in widening the scope of this horrifying topic without losing sense of the center. We are all the stars of our own movies and the death of a child affects everyone, from the neighbors of the family to personal friends to every stranger who innocently asks, “Do you have kids?” The film puts forth their points of view in short, yet effective, bursts of screen time.

I’m typically not a Nicole Kidman fan, but she comes through here. She makes her character sympathetic, vulnerable, and understandable. Aaron Eckhart also shows a different side to his acting abilities. Instead of being a smarmy playboy, he is a warm, strong family man who is hurting and alone. The husband is not as well developed here as the female lead is, but he definitely has several powerful scenes. For me though, Dianne Wiest was the real stand out. Whenever she was in frame, I watched her.

I’m so used to seeing the indie-style applied, whether out of budgetary or artistic reasons, to movies like this. Rabbit Hole, however, looks like a movie with its rich lightening, lens choices, sets and environments. It made me remember that movies like this were once made like movies. The application felt new again.

If I Picked the Oscars 2011 (in order of my vote)

Best Actress:

• Natalie Portman (Black Swan)
• Nicole Kidman (Rabbit Hole)
• Michelle Williams (Blue Valentine)
• Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right)
• Jennifer Lawrence (Winter’s Bone)

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I went into the read thinking that this was going to be an action novel for some reason. The title is very provocative and the movie promos feature a very dynamic-looking female character. I’ve done my best to stay away from details about this book so I really wasn’t prepared for what I encountered.

Spoilers below:
Since I was expecting an action novel, the ploddingly slow start was confusing. The prose is not unpleasant, and the details are interesting, but there is a lot of explaining and talking without anything much happening. This goes on for more than half the book.

When I finally realized that I was going to be reading a murder mystery and a financial mystery, I pretty much knew right away what the resolutions were going to be. The set up for both story lines are pretty obvious. No, I was not prepared for the exact specifics and how disturbing the crime portion turned out to be, but those plot revelations always had to be told to us. They were not ones that we, the readers, could have figured out on our own. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is that kind of mystery.

Overall, the book was readable and fairly entertaining. I did read late into the night because I wanted to find out what happened. But I do have trouble with the questionable pacing and the lack of depth within the main characters.

I know that this was a first effort, and that Larsson died before the manuscripts ever reached an editor’s eye, but for me, it would have been a pick-up-and-put-down novel. I’m still not sure why it has just caught fire around the world. Thanks to the reputation of the series, however, I will have to give the second book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, a try.

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Ask Aunt Susan by Seth Bockley
Directed by Joanie Schultz
Goodman Theatre, Owen Theatre

This post is two months late. Ask Aunt Susan played in November as a part of the Goodman’s New Stages Amplified series, which is such an interesting idea. Three playwrights were given the opportunity to workshop brand new plays in front of live audiences. Essentially, I would be watching a work in progress, and I would just happen to catch this one on the last day of its run.

With that in mind, I must nevertheless recommend to Seth Bockley that he really has to buckle down and do some additional work on this piece if he wants to make it live.

If I remember correctly, the play was 90 minutes with no intermission, a requirement of the workshop. The play that I saw was not a 90-minute play.

The plot set up is pretty straight forward. A young computer guy gets roped into writing content for an online advice site as “Aunt Susan.” His troubles multiply as this fictional character explodes in popularity.

The play starts off really well with a good establishment of character and the promise of some lively dialogue. Here, we are grounded in a pretty realistic world. As the play progresses though, it morphs more and more into techno-noir.

I have no idea if “techno-noir” is a thing or not but I must confess that I didn’t pick up that this was a noir work until the post-show discussion.

Noir is a lot about atmosphere and feeling, sometimes at the expense of a logical plot. Noir hides characters’ motivations and invites sinister undertones. If the audience (me) is not aware of this noir intention, a disconnect and dislike can really come quickly.

Independent of this, I felt that there were too many other competing trends and themes to go along side. Are we going to talk about identity, alienation, cyber-morality, the validity of relationships online, and capitalistic greed?

The play either needs to be expanded in length to better develop what needs to be developed or have its content edited to be more comfortable in its 90-minute skin. The characters were either too many or not-developed enough. The main character’s breakdown either needs to be more realistic or more crazy. The play felt trapped in between both ends of what it could be. To be entirely honest though, I’m not sure it could be saved into something beyond merely ok.

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