By Mark HadleyWednesday 23 Feb 2011MoviesReading Time: 3 minutes
Rabbit Hole
Rating: M
Distributor: Roadshow
Release Date: February 17
Rabbit Hole builds its story around Becca and Howie, a seemingly perfect couple played by Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart. The film is based on the 2006 Broadway play by David Lindsay-Abaire (Robots / Inkheart). Both productions deal with Becca and Howie’s struggle to cope with the death of Danny, their pre-school son. For eight months they have been attending a therapy group with other bereaved parents, but their presence has only begun to highlight just how entrenched their grief has become.
The film seems to be named for that famous rabbit hole at the beginning of Alice In Wonderland. It too is a dark, twisting place like Becca’s grief, with just as many doors leading to uncertain destinations. And once inside neither Alice nor Becca are sure how they will get out again. The title highlights one of the film’s guiding truths: grief is a highly individual experience, one that cannot be navigated the same way by any two people.
Christians play a significant role in Rabbit Hole, representing a number of perspectives to the grieving couple. The most common and least helpful ‘God has a plan’ approach does remarkably little for either Becca or people experiencing real-life grief. However theologically correct, those in the midst of heart-rending sorrow are not well placed to distinguish between God’s control of all things and God’s desire for all things to be as they are. It’s true that all choices, even the death of a child, are God’s to make. However pain is not His desire. He works for a world where death and suffering will have passed away, and all history is calculated to bring us within reach of it. Sadly, Becca’s grief pins her to the short term and she can only see a God who requires worship but repays her with pain.
A film well worth watching for its multi-faceted guide to the world of grief and as a warning on how not to respond to those suffering one of the worst pains this world has to offer.
Inside Job
RATING: PG
DISTRIBUTOR: Sony
RELEASE DATE: February 17
Inside Job is heavy going but as worthy of our attention as An Inconvenient Truth. Documentary maker Charles Ferguson uncovers the arrogance and outright criminal behaviour that made the 2008 Global Financial Crisis not only possible but inevitable.
“When you start to believe you can make something from nothing, it’s very hard to resist,” says Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. He is commenting on unrestrained drive for profit that dominated financial institutions in the early part of the new millennium. Inside Job details an international trend towards deregulation that was stripping away the restraints from financial traders, who were finding new and increasingly improbable ways of turning mounting debts into on-paper profit. The result was a financial runaway train of global proportions that no one saw the need to get off because everyone believed they are sitting in the only safe seat.
And maybe they were right. Inside Job shows that the relationships between big business and governments had becomes so enmeshed by 2008 that the failure of one necessitated a staggering bailout by the other. “It was a completely avoidable crisis,” says Charles Ferguson, travelling the world and interviewing the highest levels of the financial sector to make his case. “Yet due to the industry’s increasing wealth and power, each crisis [that has occurred] has seen few people go to prison.”
The GFC cost the world economy over $20 trillion dollars and resulted in millions of people losing their jobs. Yet the United States is yet to sentence a single person despite evidence of fraud that caused a planet-wide financial meltdown. And Inside Job insists the world is no safer today. Why? Because the businessmen, politicians and academics that designed the policies which led to the GFC also happen to be the ones entrusted with leading us out of its aftermath.
Inside Job highlights one of the fundamental problems with capitalism. The free market may distribute resources efficiently but any system built on greed and the scarcity of resources is bound to encourage the worst, not the best in the human heart.