RABBIT HOLE

This movie (based on a play) is about a young couple who is dealing with the loss of their 4-year-old son.  Eight months have passed since he was killed when hit by a car driven by a neighborhood teenager.  The couple, Howie and Becca each have their distinctively different ways of coping.  Howie goes to support group meetings, while Becca thinks it's all just a bunch of crap.  In one meeting, another couple speaking of their own loss said, "God needed another angel," to which Becca replied, "Then why didn't he just make one?  He is God, after all."  Becca, whose sister is pregnant, is trying to be supportive of the pregnancy, all the while having to listen to her mother compare Becca's loss to her own (she lost her own son, Becca's brother, to drugs).  But he was an adult  crack head who made fateful decisions, not a helpless little boy.  Part of Becca's way of handling her grief is to get rid of their son's stuff -- to give it to her sister for her new baby, or to take some things to Goodwill, or simply throw it away.
Howie, on the other hand, wants to cling to everything that reminds him of their son.  He doesn't want to erase him from their lives.
So they take their own separate paths of grief, but somehow never stop loving and supporting each other.  They find different people to confide in and lean on.  Howie meets a woman from his support group who seems to understand exactly what he's going through, and Becca reaches out to the very teenager who was driving the car that killed her son.
I very cautiously went to see this movie.  As I have said many times before, I don't like movies about miserable people and their miserable lives.  But the previews I had seen for RABBIT HOLE led me to believe that this wouldn't be the case here.  And it wasn't.
While these two people are going through the hardest thing anyone could have to endure, putting unbelievable strains on their relationships and careers, there is a glimmer of hope here.  It never gets over-emotional, even though you sometimes wonder why not.  You leave the movie thinking that they're somehow going to get through this.