Armitage as performance critic [Spoilers for “Rabbit Hole”]

Recently rereading this interview from last summer, I remembered a loose end I had wanted to track down for awhile. This is Alice Wyllie interviewing Mr. Armitage in The Scotsman, although this is far from the first time we’ve heard him express a preference against solo performances, and I have a vague memory of him saying something similar about Kidman elsewhere in a slightly earlier interview:

As for other performers, he rather likes a no-actor-is-an-island approach, suggesting that often actors tease the best performances out of one other. “There’s a type of acting where you produce the work yourself which is great and it’s skilful,” he says. “But I believe in the kind of acting where you make somebody else act. There’s a brilliant scene in Rabbit Hole with Nicole Kidman and a completely unknown actor, just sitting on a bench, and he makes her act better than I’ve ever seen her act before. I think I can make another actor act better, and hopefully someone else can make me produce something that I’ve never produced before.”

I thought it would be fun to track this down and ask you what you think, so I checked the movie out of the library. I didn’t see it in the theatre; frankly, although I have nothing against Nicole Kidman (and a copious amount of sympathy for her as a person because she was married to Tom Cruise all those years and then ended up with someone who needed drug rehab), she’s not specifically a reason for me to see a film, either. In fact, I had a hard time remembering films I’ve seen her in other than Eyes Wide Shut (a film I admired, though I don’t remember her performance) and I suspect the last one was The Hours. So I haven’t seen her in most of the roles for which she’s been so lavishly praised. But she seems to be generally regarded as a talented artist, at least if all the award nominations she’s gotten in the last decade are any indication.

Kidman was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as Becca Corbett in Rabbit Hole. She did not win. The 2010 Best Actress nominations involved serious competition. Natalie Portman won for Black Swan — a film that, like Didion, I can’t assess even remotely objectively because I find the women’s issues addressed personally upsetting, and which, I suspect, if I had not been half-crazed on that day due to the flooding of my office and the loss of my wallet, would have remained much less potent in my memory. Didion’s choice would have been Jennifer Lawrence for Winter’s Bone, and I tend to agree with her, although I’ve now seen Michelle Williams in Blue Valentine and was impressed by her as well. I didn’t see The Kids Are All Right because it was airing about the time I got back to the U.S. from Germany that summer, and none of the criticism I read made me remotely interested in seeing it. So the upshot of this paragraph is: plenty of great female performances were nominated for the 2010 Oscar and after having seen this one, though I liked the film a great deal, I’d have ranked Portman third and Kidman fourth among the performances I saw.

***

The film tells the story of a young East Coast couple — although only the supporting actors successfully sustain that element of the script; Kidman and her costar don’t even feign it, despite an unintentionally funny scene in which they both laboriously mispronounce the word “realtor” in order to give themselves street cred — struggling to deal with the death of their young son, Danny, who was killed after running out into the street to follow his dog. Becca Corbett (Kidman) displays behaviors that suggest both an eagerness to move on and a simultaneous incapacity to confront her loss, while her husband Howie (Aaron Eckhart) finds himself unable to let go. About the time that Becca’s sister, Izzy (Tammy Blanchard), announces an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, the tension in Becca and Howie’s brittle consensus moves toward open trouble as their up-till-then implicit disagreement about how to deal with their son’s death explodes. A confrontation at a birthday party for Becca’s mother, Nat (Dianne Wiest), also a bereaved parent, reveals the contours of Becca’s capacity to push away from herself anything she doesn’t want to hear.

As her marriage disintegrates, while waiting in traffic for a school bus to unload, Becca accidentally notices Jason (newcomer Miles Teller), the teenaged driver who killed her son. She begins to stalk him, following his bus and checking out books he returns to the library, until one day he confronts her, and they go to a park to talk.

[Three of the four scenes that Becca and Jason share take place in the park with the characters sitting on a bench, so it’s hard to know exactly which scene Mr. Armitage might have meant (though I tend to think it’s either the first or the second scene I’ve clipped). Here’s the first one, after Jason confronts Becca. As you play the clips, keep in mind that what we’re looking for here, to answer our questions about Armitage’s statement, is not Teller’s performance, but rather how Teller’s performance affects Kidman’s, drawing things out of her she might not otherwise share.]

By talking with Jason, Becca seems to begin to establish a bridge toward dealing with her feelings about Danny’s death, but even so, matters between Becca and Howie worsen. Becca refuses to continue attending a support group and (accidentally) deletes a cell phone video of Danny that Howie’s been watching obsessively. Becca continues to meet Jason. At their second meeting, she reveals that she’s read a book he checked out from the library on the topic of parallel universes, the scientific theory that the quantum nature of the universe requires that all possible outcomes of events occur somewhere in infinite space. Jason tells her that he’s creating a comic book based on this idea.

Finally, Howie appears to give in — he agrees to sell their home and, continuing to attend the bereavement support group, develops an attraction to a fellow victim of bereavement, Gabby (Sandra Oh), who reveals that she and her husband have separated. During an open house, prospective buyers unintentionally confront Howie with how others might see his inability to let go of the material presence of his son in the way that Becca has been encouraging him to, and he concedes to his wife that they will need to remove their son’s toys from the bedroom that had been his. But just as the open house ends, Jason walks into the Corbetts’ house, having seen the “Open House” sign, to show Becca his finished comic. An altercation ensues between Howie and Jason:

This scene seems to indicate that everything is over for Howie and Becca. A day or so later, Howie drives to Gabby’s house with the apparent intention of spending the night, but just as he walks into her yard, he changes his mind. He returns home to find Becca gone. Dashing out of the house the second he left, she tries to return the comic book to Jason, whom she discovers in front of his house, on his way to prom. She waits for his return but falls asleep in her car, where he finds her the next morning. They return to the park for a final conversation.

Becca returns home, afterward, to find Howie despairing that she’s left him. The film ends with the ensuing conversation, in which Howie envisions for Becca how they might stay in their house and host a picnic. I interpreted this scene to mean that they decided to stay together, although my father, who watched it with me, concluded that they did not. (This is an unbelievably strange response insofar as my father is a die-hard optimist and views me as a cold pessimist, although I’d assess myself as a realist.) I understand from reading wikipedia that the stage play (see below) was funnier and sweeter than the movie.

***

Eckhart, Kidman, Oh, Teller, and two Lionsgate executives attend the Rabbit Hole premiere, December 2, 2010, New York City. Source.

Had Armitage said that the unexpected great performance here is delivered by Miles Teller, I would have agreed immediately. (I loved Dianne Wiest, but she’s been memorable in everything I’ve ever seen her in.) Teller so completely embodies the male adolescent on the verge of leaving home that one’s a bit dumbfounded by watching him, and in that performance I saw a distillation of the hundreds of male eighteen-year-olds I’ve encountered in September of their freshman year of college over the last two decades. I can’t exclude the possibility that Teller was simply playing himself, of course (and an interview with him reveals that scars on his face are real and he survived a serious car crash). In that case, however, he has an amazing ability to avoid self-consciousness on camera. I particularly loved his mimesis of what I think of as the “lag time” effect in that demographic — they are smart, potentially sensitive, and often of good will — but they are only starting to be able to access those parts of themselves, fighting through layers of stuff they’ve painted on to cover over their personalities in order to survive their adolescences. Teller gets this fractured, momentarily provisional access to self just right, placing pregnant silences around Jason’s awareness of the gravity of his accident, an awareness that underlies the “clueless” aplomb of the eighteen-year-old that is sometimes a defense mechanism and other times a sincere reaction.

But Armitage’s remark doesn’t praise Teller’s performance as much as it evaluates Kidman’s (or it praises Teller’s performance by evaluating Kidman’s). He’s quoted as having said, “a completely unknown actor, just sitting on a bench […] makes her act better than I’ve ever seen her act before.” In fact, I would say that whatever merits she displays in other settings, Kidman was not at her best in this film. Throughout most of the film, she maintains a surprisingly immobile face, and she infects all her anger with a sort of schoolmarmish vibe that infelicitously recalls Meg Ryan at her twitchiest. At a few points, the viewer even sees Kidman “acting.” It’s preposterously odd, for example, that the scene where Howie tries (unsuccessfully) to convince Becca to resume sexual relationships is curiously devoid of darker forces — sexual attraction, frustration, anger, tension — at all. I’m inclined to agree that her best scenes in the film occur with Teller (or Wiest, but Armitage didn’t comment on that, sorry, Ms. Wiest, I leave you by the wayside here). So in the joint scenes with Teller, what does his eighteen-year-old gravitas draw from her? One thing we see is the mobility of her face in reaction to him, something she doesn’t really achieve in response to her costar — of this more below — and one suspects that this is something that Armitage himself prizes: a face that hints at what is going on underneath even when it doesn’t explicitly signal something. Her facial movements at first recalls the encouragement signal that I find myself performing in conversations with men that age — when attempting to draw them out, for example — but move on to indicate Becca’s own desperation about the encounter, both her need to talk to Jason and her fears about doing so. What’s consistent is the closings of these first two scenes — Kidman gets her eyes open a lot wider than usual, and we can see something flickering behind them, a suffering that we simply don’t see in her scenes with Eckhart.

Rabbit Hole is based on a stage play of the same name that won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Its New York production garnered Cynthia Nixon a Tony for Best Actress, a result that points out something about finding the right roles. A great role elevates a middling performer, perhaps — and only the greatest of performers can surmount the problems of a poorly scripted role? In particular, this consideration makes me question my initial reaction to Eckhart, whose acting I found consistently overdone and bothersome to the point of distraction, and whom I at first concluded was fatally miscast in a way that damages the whole film. If Kidman is often bland, Eckhart overcompensates. In consequence, he was not convincing to me either as a bereaved parent or an aggrieved partner, nor even as an East Coaster (he projects a sunny western bonhomie that he can’t seem to put under wraps), and I concluded that he was cast because he’s cute — as he displays neither convincing anger that reaches deep into the character’s pain, nor much emotional depth overall, in this performance. If I reflect on this conundrum on the level of the actors, I would be tempted to conclude that his youth notwithstanding, Teller is a much more thoughtful person than Eckhart. And if it’s true that Kidman, who produced the film, cast Eckhart because she thought he’d be a good husband, then I’m tempted to say, bad choice, if you wanted someone to play a husband whose inner weaknesses are convincingly revealed by life-altering stress. You want a bad husband in spe to play this role, not a good one.

Seen from the viewpoint of the script, however, Teller may have had a better chance of drawing a more effective performance from Kidman than Eckhart simply because something unites Becca and Jason that Howie lacks — the struggle with questions about free will addressed by the notion of parallel universes (would Danny be alive if we hadn’t had that dog? why didn’t I drive down a different block that day?). Both Becca and Jason are tortured by the possibility that things could have been different, that a somewhere exists where events would have kept Jason from hitting Danny with his car, which is precisely the notion that ends up rehabilitating Becca in the end — the thought that somewhere else she is not suffering, but making pancakes. The screenplay doesn’t ever give Howie an entrée into that problem; for him, his world is never plausibly different from the one that he actually inhabits, and the only alternative consists of cell phone videos. This state of affairs suggest that Eckhart would have needed to find another way mentally into the problem of suffering if his scenes with Kidman were to have drawn a better performance from her. (One suspects he should have thought more either about his problematic addiction to the cell phone video, or about his temptation to infidelity.) If we extrapolate from what Armitage said about acting to thinking about the screenplay, we could potentially conclude that it relies too much on the formal fact of Becca and Howie’s marital relationship to put them in relationship to each other and doesn’t give us enough indications of their (earlier) connections. Hence, even without having read it, I have some reason to suspect the complaints from some critics that the screenplay negatively reduced the script of the play might be justified.

In other words, the question I would ask Armitage first after reading his remark and seeing this film:

Granted that Teller draws a better performance from Kidman than any other actor in this film, is that result due to something that Teller is doing in his performance? If so, what is so successful about it from your perspective? Or, if the screenplay is the means of constituting the terms of their interaction, does Teller draw a better performance from Kidman because the screenplay puts Becca and Jason into a closer implied relationship to each other than to any other characters? If your theory about interactions between actors drawing out better performances is correct, doesn’t the screenplay give Teller have an inherently better chance than Eckhart to provoke Kidman’s best product?

The next question would be:

If Teller draws a better performance than usual from Kidman, what is she doing for him? And what does your answer to this question to to enhance your theory about the consequences of successful actor synergies?

What do you think?

~ by Servetus on July 1, 2012.