The line between harmony and heartbreak becomes profoundly blurred in the achingly beautiful Rachel Getting Married, a film that is certainly not always enjoyable, but does always ring powerfully true. Wrenching and uncompromising, it is wise enough to know that no family is wholly dysfunctional. Grace, like hope springs eternal, even it if waits in the wings until the very last moment to reveal itself.
Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) is getting married. Among her many expected guests are friends, family and regrettably, her sister Kym’s (Anne Hathaway) innumerable demons. Kym is a recovering drug addict who, as the film opens, is leaving rehab to attend her sister’s wedding. Home, like any home, is a place where Kym is the both the safest and the most in danger.
Kym’s seesawing emotions make her a diseased untouchable. She is unbalanced, ever just one moment from spinning apart. Kym wants all the sympathy and all the attention. She finds Rachel’s wedding an unfair distraction from her grievances and personal struggles. As the spotlight begrudgingly shifts from one sister to the other, the bride lashes out, unable to forget Kym’s many drug-fueled transgressions, including one which led to a family tragedy. Try as her father (Bill Irwin) might, he cannot keep the peace, and we wait, on pins and needles, for a meltdown that we know must come.
Rachel Getting Married contains moments of profound discomfort. And profound grace. Venomous guilt finds forgiveness. At least for today. Unconditional love is not instantaneous and is never easy. In the end, the film settles into a sort of peace, not the sort of peace that comes with resolution and triumph, but the sort that, as is invoked at Kym’s many support meetings, finds serenity in the midst of things it cannot change.
Although director Jonathan Demme is perhaps best known for his Oscar-winning thriller, The Silence of the Lambs, he has spent the past several years immersed in such documentaries as The Agronomist and Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains. Those films work as connective tissue to Rachel Getting Married, whose first-rate script was penned by Jenny Lumet, daughter of the late actor/director Sidney Lumet. Demme’s choice to shoot the film with handheld cameras gives it an intensely naturalistic feel. It’s as though we are watching someone’s home movies — an amateur, cinéma vérité catalogue of the events of one terrible, magical weekend. Rachel Getting Married is never ever rushed. Large chunks of it take place in near real time. We are not merely observers, we are guests.
The cast is no less genuine. Anne Hathaway is jaw-droppingly good. Those viewers who still remember her innocent rise in The Princess Diaries and Ella Enchanted are in for a shock…and a treat. This is Hathaway as we have never seen her before — emotionally shredded, psychologically naked, foul-mouthed and revoltingly narcissistic. Credit also belongs to the terrific supporting cast, particularly DeWitt and Irwin. Debra Winger, who hasn’t starred in a film in several years, returns to the screen in splendid form as Rachel and Kym’s emotionally evasive mother.
Rachel Getting Married is one of the most alive things you’ll see all year. It positively pulsates with energy, vibrates with life. The wedding, when we finally get to it, is like something out of Mardi Gras, a bohemian celebration of color and music and love and hope. It is the film in miniature, a reverie of passion, a messy, heartfelt, uninhibited ode to living. Kym comes from a musical family and the film is drenched in song. Around every turn, literally and cinematic, sits someone plucking a melody from a willing instrument. Some moments the instruments blend together in rapturous harmony and other times collapse into discordant noise. But they never stop playing. They never stop making music.
© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.
