Fire in the Hole

John Cameron Mitchell’s first feature film concerned a transsexual punk rocker, his second film started off with a very flexible man giving himself a blowjob, and his third film deals with a middle-class couple losing their child.

Some may say he’s gone soft and others might say he’s matured. What is certain is that he’s extremely talented. His treatment of sex is frank without being offensive, which is quite a feat in puritanical America.

In his latest film, Rabbit Hole, there is no sex, yet it is all about sex. More about this later.

Apparently his executive producer and leading lady, Nicole Kidman, had to fight to get this project off the ground, which is commendable, and chose Mitchell to direct it, which is just plain smart. She should have won her Oscar for it rather than Natalie Portman, who can act but not dance. But then Kidman won the statuette for playing Virginia Woolf, which was a mistake on all fronts through no fault of hers.

Kidman, whom a lot of woman don’t like, interestingly, plays the kind of role in which - from a male point of view - she excels. That is, a repressed woman. You could see it in the hugely underrated and terrifying The Others and you can see it here. The more she keeps it in the more she oozes one thing and one thing only. Sex.

As for the story, Mitchell takes us from the obscure to the known in startling ways. Kidman’s Becca sees a boy in a bus and effectively starts stalking him. It’s only much later that we realise he’s the boy who accidentally killed her son. That technique applies to the truth about losing loved ones too. It takes her mother, played by the superb Dianne Wiest, to finally deliver the sad, hard truth that the pain of loss doesn’t go away, you just learn to live with it.

Aaron Eckhart’s Howie wants to hang on to every visible reminder of his dead son but, eight months on, he also understandably wants sex. Becca, however, wants to get rid of every reminder of her son, because she doesn’t frankly need it to remind her of a child she can see and feel everywhere, but is not interested in sex, whether for its own sake or replacing her dead son with another child. So there you have your classic marital stalemate.

Unfortunately we don’t get to know what Howie does for their rather ideal lifestyle, except that he works in an office that brings in enough moola to afford a double-storey house by a lake and two very expensive German cars. This weakens and limits the drama a little because a lot of people would simply not be interested in what could be described as their comfortable misery.

But as a portrait of a marriage in difficulty it is spot-on, yet it is also more sexual than Mitchell’s second feature, Shortbus, which is as explicit as you can get. After all, even Kidman has said that “you don’t have to be naked to be sexy”.

Exactly, Nicole. Exactly.

***

Also out on DVD now is Restrepo, a documentary featuring an American platoon in the Korengal Valley, apparently the most dangerous area in war-torn Afghanistan.

Made by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, who was killed in Libya this year, we spend a year with these soldiers in what is described as the real The Hurt Locker, about which I beg to differ.

The latter, though fiction, is unbearably tense, and it is set in Iraq. Those are two vastly different “theatres of operation”, but neither addresses the question of why their soldiers are there.

This means they implicitly legitimise the American presence, rightly or wrongly, but therefore the latter especially fails, since it’s supposed to be a journalistic work. We have seen enough films that give us the “feel” of war – Platoon, Full Metal Jacket – to want to know more.

Restrepo, named after one of the soldiers who was killed during that year, doesn’t have a voice-over but gives us the basic facts in text on a black background. Other than that, the soldiers speak directly to camera, mostly after their “tour” is over, which further diminishes the so-called tension.

The camera also annoyingly stays on their eyes, in close up, waiting for these boys to cry. It is a particularly nauseating journalistic technique, which was handled well in the New Zealand doco Brother Number One, reviewed a few weeks ago.

If Junger and Hetherington should be commended for getting as close to the line of fire as possible, then the reason why Inside Job got the Oscar was because it showed us - often entertainingly - just how corrupt the upper echelons of American society are while their working-class compatriots kill and die for them in faraway, oil-rich countries.

Neil Sonnekus