Rachel Getting Married (2008)

In Rachel Getting Married, director Jonathan Demme’s compassion shines through in a way that even good directors’ films rarely do; in this sense, the picture more recently recalls Shoot the Moon, Away from Her, other Demme, and, currently, little. Everything here contributes to a miserable-wonderful-electric state of being. Demme’s misguided Charade remake, The Truth About Charlie, used the French New Wave as an experiment and a fashion statement, but in Rachel Getting Married the visual devices have a point – an urgency. The camera is desperate, searching, we feel life eluding the characters, the good times half-forgotten and giving way to the bad before they’ve been properly savored. The picture explodes in bursts of energy and music; it doubles (layers) in the way Kael wrote of Something Wild doubling. This new Demme picture merges the ideal qualities of a young and old filmmaker – a younger filmmaker’s curiosity and need to get it all out with an older filmmaker’s consideration and humanity. Rachel Getting Married is the film you find yourself fantasizing about as you watch your fiftieth coming of age romantic roundelay – an honorable formula picture – a picture that uses formula not out of cynicism or laziness, but as a springboard for something less tangible – an emotional blow-out, an instinctive trance-out, a bliss that closer resembles a beloved pop album.

Demme employs something currently vogue again: the hand-held, slightly over-exposed, constantly in motion camera, and takes it further than most filmmakers seem willing. Many current filmmakers, particularly the ones huddled under the annoying “mumblecore” umbrella, use a self-conscious diet vérité style as license to deny us poetry. Under the guise of “realism” many of these filmmakers pass non-films off as films (not a new trend), and wait for their friends and others embarrassed of the conventional pleasures of the medium to applaud them (they’re applauding their own willingness to deny themselves pleasure). Demme still gives us poetry, in the pauses and the interludes, in the in-jokes and the speeches, in the bursts of patter that tell us little in the words, but a lot in the delivery, and in the music that never ceases. Demme trusts you to find his poetry – a trick of a lamp, a woman standing over a pool, a gaze from a swing, that others would base their entire films around. Rachel Getting Married has many painful-squishy moments (admittedly too many – a few are too trumped for tears), but we don’t come away from it feeling mauled as we do with many other critically acclaimed pictures released this time of year. Demme isn’t interested in bleak chic – his obsession with the every day click-clicks of life won’t allow for it.

The buzz of the surface craft of the film has a poignancy, and relevance, beyond its own sake, though that would be enough. The editing is an extension of character in Rachel Getting Married – a fragile recognition of its hero’s manic self-loathing. Kym (Anne Hathaway), a possibly reformed drinker and drugger, is so busy defending herself to herself in front of others that she misses the beauty of everything we’re admiring. We’re in Kym’s head from the start. We share her panic, her self-fulfilling fear of drowning in embarrassment and inferiority. Jenny Lumet’s flawed, pat script has brought the great Demme from the 1980s back to fictional films - this picture is undeniably a fantasy, but it’s the fantasy of family life that Kym, and many others, feels is always just around the corner, or behind the cabinet – eluding her, and them. Rachel Getting Married represents a kind of utopia, an idealized vision of two families, one self-absorbed and troubled, the other still and talented and sage and idealized (they’re commanding, but shallow – deliberate symbols, sometimes to the point of irritation) – uniting in flourishes of energy and tolerance. It could be trite and insulting, it possibly should be, but Demme is too drunk on the momentum of the possibilities of interaction – the picture has the effect of dominos tumbling.

With Kym, Anne Hathaway has been given the part that many self-conscious young starlets attempt every year to varying degrees of success. Hathaway, from The Princess Diaries to Havoc to Brokeback Mountain to The Devil Wears Prada to Rachel Getting Married, clearly wants to be a great actress, perhaps too clearly. Hathaway’s roles strike me more as experiments than calculations, leaps into something she hopes approximates brilliance of effect, but she’s always nice, slight, and too studied. I root for Hathaway, but she never quite pulls it off, and she has an unfortunate tendency to lose scenes to her co-stars. Kym plays into Hathaway’s qualities – the eagerness to please, the not-quite-channeled talent, the delicate, sometimes ghostly beauty, and it’s the surprising parallel between role and star that gives Kym bite. Kym is a scriptwriter’s device, and she has a lousy, needless, skeleton in the closet, but Hathaway’s unexpected empathy sidesteps the stunt. The actress’s palpable, human hunger drives the character’s hungers to places of true need.

Kym is still the role most programmed to elicit a specific reaction. The star of this film is the collective world, the mix of actors, musicians, and family and friends of Demme. Bill Irwin, as Kym and Rachel’s father, has a haunting, hollowed face – a Rosetta’s Stone of domestic tragedies that humanizes his daughters’ manias. Rosemarie DeWitt’s Rachel is possibly the strongest performance in the movie, she takes you into her teeter-tottering movements of rage, resentment and pity – she establishes the family, fluidly, subtly, as a family of over-thought, recklessly talented nuts. Rachel, the character who, in a lesser movie, would be the asexual, conventional shrew, is the force of Rachel Getting Married –a contradiction – a sexy, intelligent, indulgent woman constantly swept to the side-stage. DeWitt gives the picture’s riskiest moments tonally (particularly a long kitchen confession) the immediacy of theatre – she lends the seemingly matter-of-fact title a heartbreaking subtext: Kym is flamboyantly fucked-up, a glamorous, self-absorbed crash site – Rachel is just getting married.

The casting, from Hathaway, to Irwin, to DeWitt, to Debra Winger, has an imagination and eerie exactitude that reminds one of Altman and good Coppola. We can see Irwin and Winger on DeWitt and Hathaway’s faces, and we see the parents’ ticks blend in the language of their children’s bodies. Demme’s most perverse move is the casting of Winger. Debra Winger, perhaps the most gloriously unguarded, sensual actress in American movies in the 1980s, is straight-jacketed as the requisite passive-aggressive, remote, manipulative phantom here. By denying the sort of curtain call that Demme knows certain movie fans crave of Debra Winger, he puts us right with Kym and Rachel – a hope dashed.

The first two-thirds of Rachel Getting Married is one of the best films of its kind in years and the best Jonathan Demme picture since The Silence of the Lambs. The last third of Rachel Getting Married, in which all proper pretense of script is discarded, is the best Demme picture since Something Wild (still his masterpiece). Demme, as Stop Making Sense and Neil Young: Heart of Gold demonstrated, understands how music affects us, how it medicates us, and how it materializes our heartbreak in a way that no other art quite does. It has something to do with the portability of music, it follows us, comments on us, allows us to comment on ourselves, and allows us to move to it and communicate and cleanse ourselves. The third act of Rachel Getting Married is an unusually long, vivid chronicling of the wedding, of characters we’ve met casting themselves head first into the celebration – cajoling and reaching for catharsis. This last act has the warmth and grace of Heart of Gold as well as the wild-wooly tone of Something Wild – we’re watching a physical, cinematic recap of the well-staged but more conventional stuff of the first hour – we’re seeing the characters at their truest and their most rehearsed in equal measure, we’re seeing how people respond to weddings, how they flirt with giving in to the illusion of renewed possibility – that all the clichés of love and life are true. Demme has found a pure current here – undiluted movie empathy.

This may be why people are already trying to discredit the picture, why the backlash has already begun, why people are resting on the picture’s admitted faults as a crutch to avoid the more vulnerable things Rachel Getting Married eventually gets to. How can one hate a picture with this many moments, this much intoxication, this much “much”? People have occasionally laughed at me for championing Demme’s screwball mobster spoof Married to the Mob, which they write off as ridiculous. Moments in Rachel Getting Married are ridiculous too, but the film is beautiful and memorable – a testament to the pursuit of the ridiculous, to what we tell ourselves in the hopes of giving a damn.

Posted on November 9th, 2008 in Reviews, Drama, 2008 |

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