Rachel Getting Married
Directed by Jonathan Demme
Running Time: 114 min.
Two-thirds into Rachel Getting Married,
after Kym (Anne Hathaway) leaves rehab to participate in her sister’s
wedding, her arrival stirs up tensions and memories. There are so many
characters, unsettled relationships and unpredictable situations that a
viewer’s head spins delightedly.
Director Jonathan Demme sustains this feat of whirling prestidigitation
with rambunctious style. He and cinematographer Declan Quinn simulate
the shaky aesthetics of a home movie. But the hectic, true-life
approach constructs a tenacious, essentially faithful vision. Avoiding
the hip nihilism of repugnant family dramas like Margot at the Wedding
and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, Demme offers compassion.
Despite the story’s adversities—Kym’s sibling rivalry with Rachel
(Rosemarie DeWitt), the anxious protectiveness of their father Paul
(Bill Irwin), their distant, now-remarried mother Abby (Debra Winger),
plus the pressure of friends and in-laws—serenity keeps emerging. And
it’s hard-earned.
This is a family-chaos film that’s also lively and fertile; a view of
life energized by the awareness of transience, dissatisfaction,
unfairness—and the will to keep going. Comparisons to Demme’s famously
benevolent Citizen’s Band (1977), Melvin and Howard (1980) and
Something Wild (1987) don’t explain what’s distinctive about this
achievement. Centered on Anne Hathaway’s Kym, a fragile yet
self-punishing emotional hurricane, it’s Demme’s most distinctively
politically sensitive movie—made to look rushed and feel hurried as if
heading-off disaster and documenting relief.
Not surprisingly, Rachel Getting Married
follows a remarkable run of Demme non-fiction films: the plangent
mortality-musical Neil Young: Heart of Gold, the sympathetic Jimmy
Carter: Man from Plains and Right to Return: New Home Movies from the
Lower 9th Ward, his highly original series of five half-hour docs about
Hurricane Katrina survivors that focused on faith, aspiration and
Southern character. These experiences inform Rachel’s Connecticut-set
story with spiritual awareness about the political particulars of
democracy in action, enhancing Demme’s usual family-of-man benevolence.
The motley gathering of Rachel’s wedding preparations, weekend-long
dinners, 12-step meetings and domestic battles are a 21st-century
update of 1980s multiculti measures. The race, gender, class mixture is
blessedly free of fashion and sarcasm (as when Kym is complimented,
“You’re so tiny; it’s like you’re Asian!”). Rachel is
boldly—naturally—mixed. Paul has remarried interracially (to Anna
Deavere Smith’s Carol) and Rachel finds a similar partner (Tunde
Adebimpe’s Sidney). Asserting broad humanism, Demme offers music, of
course, but primarily the rhythmed texture of voices, personalities and
unconstrained behavior: A sad/funny fight between Kym and Rachel
displays an uncannily knowing, even vicious, test of nerves; they wage
lifelong strategies of affection and resentment until one trumps the
other. Kym complains about “this little world of paranoia, judgment and
mistrust,” yet a comfortable familiarity underlies her frustration.
That’s the beautiful surprise of the fractiousness—and succor—conveyed
in Jenny Lumet’s screenplay.
Not even Thomas Bezuca’s laudable, complex The Family Stone had this
kind of exuberant resilience. Demme understands resilience as the
source of democracy—of human renewal. Showing a white Jewish female and
black male’s faux-India-themed wedding complete with Samba dancers is
joyously One-World American. Through this sincere eccentricity, Rachel
transcends the banal dirty-secrets routine of that family-gathering
Dogma film, Celebration. Demme says grace (tested by Kym’s unease)
during the first extended-family rehearsal dinner: a series of toasts
peaking with Sidney’s kind-faced mother (Carol-Jean Lewis) alluding to
paradise. She recalls those praying women from Demme’s great Beloved.
This timeless moment signals life’s precariousness and appreciates its
amplitude like the banquet in John Huston’s film of Joyce’s The
Dead—only reversed into Demme’s gratitude for the living.
Demme surveys people who learn to make do and those who can’t. Hathaway
is an ideal heroine for this with her Liza Minnelli-like eager eyes and
open vulnerability. That we yield to all these characters—particularly
Irwin, DeWitt and the avid Winger—affirms Demme’s trust. Rachel Getting Married’s social scale and emotional fullness would do Renoir and Altman proud—still it’s Demme’s genuine vision.
Lots of worldly horror pollutes our cinema this year—4 Months, 3 Weeks,
2 Days, Paranoid Park, Funny Games, Wanted, The Dark Knight, Lakeview
Terrace—without being true to life; but Rachel Getting Married defies all that by rehearsing heaven.
