Rachel Getting Married
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Movie Reviews of Rachel Getting Married
Movie Review: A realistic family drama.
Summary: 5 Stars
A woman (Anne Hathaway) is released from rehab again...and just in time to attend her sister's wedding. Emotions boil to the surface in this realistic family drama.Movie Review: A touching movie, one of the best!
Summary: 5 Stars
Jonathan Demme's super interpretation of love, regret and understanding! You can really feel it, even my husband, who's usually pretty numb about everything.Movie Review: Love This Film
Summary: 5 Stars
I love this film. I would LOVE to attend a wedding like this. The music, the multi-cultural crowd, the dancing, the saris... love it.Movie Review: Excellent performances and some real, raw emotion!
Summary: 4 Stars
Kym (Anne Hathaway) is getting out of a lengthy stint in rehab, just in time to join up with her family, as they gather at her father's house for the wedding of older sister Rachel (Rosemarie deWitt, from MAD MEN). Kym is angry, paranoid, nervous and worst of all, feels resentful if she is not the constant center of attention, which is tough on her because it IS her sister who is getting married, not her. Dad (Bill Irwin) works hard to keep Kym happy, and away from the keys to the family car. Rachel enjoys seeing her sister again for a short time...but eventually Kym becomes a toxic, demanding presence. You can't help but feel bad for Rachel, who is having her wedding nearly ruined.
Jonathan Demme's film is half scenes of large groups of friends and family enjoying wide varieties of live music, because apparently they are just all so great loved by everyone who plays music. While Rachel's fiancé Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe, member of the band TV on The Radio) is a musician, we also see no clear reason why the rehearsal dinner, the wedding and the reception is just PACKED full of a motley crew of musicians and musical styles. Some of the music is actually very good...and sometimes I was reminded of John Cleese's character in an old Monty Python sketch in which he finally screams "Shut that bloody bouzouki UP!!!" The music is non-stop. In fact, the entire logistics of the wedding feel unreal. The rehearsal dinner features one fantastically delivered toast after another. This young couple's friends are just a little TOO sincere, TOO loving, TOO wise and TOO witty. They laugh, hug, squeeze, smile and tear-up up almost constantly. It's exhausting to watch in a way, especially with all the hand-held, digital video camera work.
Those are the primary things I dislike about the film. But the other half simmers with well-written angst and fury. First and foremost is Hathaway's Kym...one seriously messed-up person. For about half the film, I well and truly hated her. She gives a speech at the rehearsal that tops any other squirm inducing speech ever given in a film. Kym is trying to pretend she wants to give a nice toast to her sister, but her anger and resentment is what really spews out...all over the uncomfortable guests. I honestly thought I was going to end up hating the film for giving us a "hero" who was so unrepentantly nasty. But we do finally get to see some family secrets that make Kym more understandable. While she doesn't rise to the level of sympathy, exactly...we do see the decent human being who once dwelt in Kym's place.
Hathaway is matched by the nearly unknown Rosemarie DeWitt. As Rachel, she is frothing with excitement over her marriage, but seething with anger over her sister. Not just at the horrible manner in which sis acts, but they have long-term issues because Kym was always the one who got all the attention, while Rachel behaved herself and was ignored.
There are a handful of truly spectacular fight scenes between Kym, Rachel and their father that may be better written than "normal" people would speak, but nonetheless the reek of truthfulness. They are raw and powerful, and for a change, the hand-held camera work actually helps the film. These three performers give terrific work.
Into a meltdown prone situation comes the girls' mother (Debra Winger). Long divorced, she feels left-out of the festivities, but is also clearly a refuge to Rachel, who yearns for her mother's time and affection. Winger gives another very nice performance, and I sure wish that Winger got more work. I know she always had a reputation for being very difficult, but her work sure seems to make the results worthwhile.
For much of the film, I felt a little bad for Sidney, the fiancée. A physically imposing figure who is also clearly just as gentle as can be, he is a quite presence in these uncomfortable scenes of confrontation. While one could argue his role is underwritten, I believe his calm is the antidote Rachel needs to a family that clearly spends lot of time TALKING! And Sidney gets to deliver one of the more touching cinematic wedding vows I've seen. For a brief moment you feel like a guest at that wedding, as he moving presents his thoughts and DeWitt beams in a way that clearly shows the actress was touched herself by the moment.
I deliberately NOT giving away any more plot details, because few things really happen, and most of them are pretty important to understanding the characters...so I'll let you discover these secrets as I did.
The movie is pretty uneven at times. As I said, the constant scenes of frolicking are just unbelievable. Apparently these folks don't know a single uptight person. I know Demme loves music, and loves to use it to move his movies along (as he did so well in SOMETHING WILD all those years ago)...but these scenes simply try our patience and feel like filler to make the movie just slightly over 90 minutes. And the hand-held camera, while affording great freedom in moving amongst the people...is also sloppy at times and the film frequently could have benefitted from a more classical cinematography.
But the performances and most of the script make this film quite worthwhile to see. Hathaway gives an unexpected performance, but there are many others in the film who should be generating Oscar buzz as well. While the ending of the film feels a little untidy, there is a truthfulness to that as well. After all, people may change and grow a little in one weekend...but do they transform?? At least the film knows that they don't.
Movie Review: An unsettlingly real portrait of a family dealing with loss and addiction at a time of celebration
Summary: 4 Stars
Several reviewers describe this film as painful to watch - and the subject matter is painful, but I found it fascinating, both because of the high level of the performances and because of the exceptionally strong camera work. I was also very impressed by the fact that the interracial marriage that gives the film its title was never made into an issue -- while there is definitely still room for films that address the various forms of prejudice (racial and otherwise) that continue to have strong roots in our societies and world, it is refreshing to live in a time where not every film that represents racial and cultural differences needs to be about prejudice. We've made some progress since Guess Who's Coming to Dinner ...
One might mistake the camera work for the low-budget, amateur home movie style that film students employ to give their productions a feel of authenticity. But that is only if you aren't paying attention to the way that the camera inevitably captures just the right angle to get just the reactions necessary to tell the story in a seemingly effortless way, or if you aren't paying attention to how seamlessly the various shots are edited together, creating a very strong feeling of continuity and flow that is both natural and spontaneous. There is a great deal of art to the seeming artlessness of this film work - in that sense the film resembles some of the best of the "Dogme 95" films (such as The Celebration or Open Hearts), that insisted on natural lighting and handheld camera work (among other things) in order to keep the focus on the performances. While I would hate it if every film were made this way, some subjects - such as the intimate family drama, such as this one -- are perfectly suited for such an approach. (Massive monsters eating NYC - as in Cloverfield - are less appropriate subjects for this treatment, and in that film it feels much more like a gimmick to add the appearance of authenticity to a patently false premise - and thereby save money on the special effects that would be required to do it in the usual way.)
Jonathan Demme adds an element to the film that may be considered a reflection upon the "home movie" style - the film is captured in the style of an outside observer who nevertheless is given complete access to the most intimate aspects of the lives of the family members. There is a member of the groom's family (perhaps his brother) who has just returned from military service in Iraq, and carries a video camera with him to capture the event, and who may serve as a kind of surrogate for the actual videographer. It is telling that Rachel's father, after praising the young man's service and hoping he will no longer be called into danger, encourages him to put down the camera: to let go of the status of a mere observer and take part in the festivities. This is, of course, a family of artists, musicians, and academics - and the soldier may feel out of place, but is encouraged not to. At some level, the film offers an ideal image of America - where cultural differences and racial differences can be taken for granted, not as differences that divide but as what makes our coming together that much more interesting. The documentary style helped make this ideal not seem so much like a Hollywood fantasy but a palpable reality. It is made easier to believe by the fact that economic differences do not figure in this film - everyone seems well enough off - but that omission should not be taken as a failing of the film as a glaring revelation (multicultural embrace tends still not to be possible except where economic status is comparable).
Another nice touch was the inclusion of Robyn Hitchcock as a wedding singer (director Jonathan Demme also directed a documentary called Storefront Hitchcock) and the inclusion of the Neal Young song "Unknown Legend" as a serenade from the title character's fiance (Demme also directed the excellent doc Heart of Gold about Young). The only thing missing was a rendition of Talking Head's "Once in a Lifetime" to recall his most famous documentary Stop Making Sense. Oh well, you can't have everything ... and I think it would have been hard to fit that in without detracting from the overall tone of the film.
For a number of reasons, I thoroughly enjoyed this film, and hope that Demme continues to make films along these lines for a long time (as much as I liked The Silence of the Lambs, I'd like to see more that have the raw and intimate feel of this one, since few major players in Hollywood have the talent to pull something like this off in a convincingly authentic way.)