Written by David Lindsay-Abaire, directed by John Cameron Mitchell, and beautifully acted principally by Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckart, this intensely emotional film is just about the most heartfelt and honest study of the desolation of loss as I've ever seen. No easy answers here - the tag line says it all: "the only way out is through", and we as an audience are taken through - terribly, inexorably, through the grief with which this couple is trying to cope.
Kidman and Eckhart deliver on every note and never devolve into maudlin sappiness or embarrassing histrionics. Dianne Weist is subtly beautiful - more beautiful in this performance than I've ever seen - and (relative unknown) Miles Teller stands up with the heavy weights whose company he keeps with grace beyond his years.
Far superior to The Kids are All Right, The King's Speech, Inception, and True Grit et al - it is a fucking crime that this subtle, honest and in the end very uplifting little film hardly got noticed at the Oscars. Perhaps it is because it dared to touch upon a secular motif in its study of mortality... better to say nothing at all than to suggest there's no heaven... who knows. Whatever. Fuck you Academy. Brilliant, moving, brave film.
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