Rachel Getting Married (2008) +

An emotionally vivid depiction of family dysfunction, an occasionally startling enactment of how the most meticulously maintained family secrets shape every dimension of intimacy and estrangement for that family. Director Jonathan Demme directs this electrified family drama with the carefully modulated intensity of a wedding planner, herding the cats inhabiting this overstuffed family drama with an elegantly attentive detachment. Rosemarie DeWitt is Rachel, who -- as the title indicates -- is getting married. Rachel's wedding instantiates the convergence of previously mostly estranged family members: Rachel's drug addict/loser sister Kym (Anne Hathaway); Rachel's desperately fragile father Paul (Bill Irwin): and Rachel's distant mother Abby (Debra Winger). Rachel is marrying Sidney (Tunde Addebimpe), a perfectly sweet musician man who promises Rachel a way from the family she's known and toward a family she wants. Rachel's wedding reflects both Sidney's musical identity (he's some kind of journeyman musician with roots planted in both the Caribbean and Hawaii) and her father's musical passion (though it's never stated outright, it does appear that Bill Irwin's Paul is some kind of musical expert, perhaps a professor of world music or at least a major collector/fan of world music objects/tunes). With her stepmother (Anna Deveare Smith) as her wedding planner, Rachel's wedding has become a world music fusion fest, complete with an Indian elephant cake done in fondant. (You almost expect the soundtrack of Rachel's wedding itself to be released on Putumayo Records.) So Demme creates this giant wedding surround for the quite intimate family drama to play against. And it works in surprising ways. The feeling of this film is like being invited, as a member of the wedding party, to a giant weekend wedding, where everyone has a "job" that's sorta mapped according to their relationship to the couple, and where everyone only knows the people they already know but everyone's supposed to be feeling part of one family, and yet even the familiar dynamics of those known relationships are tossed askew because of the utter absurdity of the event itself. Demme exploits the conventions of the wedding event -- the interminable toasts at the rehearsal dinner, the awkwardly exhausted moments of intimacy late at night, the embarrassments of the wedding reception -- Demme uses these as the spectacular backdrops for a quietly, super-intense drama about family secrets to unfold. And at the center of this family drama is Anne Hathaway's Kym, the family flameout/drug addict whose arrival on the scene (on a weekend furlough from an extended stay rehab) causes her sister, father and mother to visibly tense. I'm of two minds about the core emotional narrative of the screenplay (scripted by Jenny Lumet). On the one hand, I love that this story about shared family secrets is staged the way it is. Hathaway's Kym is clearly the family scapegoat, the often spectacular cause of the family's troubles. And everyone knows this, including/especially Kym. So, as often as not, Kym performs to the expectations of her family role. I like this narrative framing, especially how -- as the narrative progresses -- we become increasingly attuned to the ways in which everyone else has played a part in off-loading the family's troubles on to Kym. In what is arguably the film's most electrifying sequence, Hathaway's Kym confronts Debra Winger's Abby about a crucial set of decisions that she (as Kym's mother) made, a set of decisions that contributed to a family tragedy for which Kym was directly responsible. As Hathaway's Kym presses her mother to speak simply about what actually happened, to abandon rehearsed platitudes and actually talk, Winger's Abby erupts in an accusatory rage -- carefully stuffed emotions bursting forth with vicious force -- and wallops Kym across the face. And, being the feral sort that she is, Kym smacks back, a gesture less of rage than, as we soon see, as a desperate expression of a latent survival instinct and Kym flees, suicidally, into the night. This scene, like a scene that precedes it, in which Kym attempts to honestly answer her sisters questions while their father tries desperately to smooth things over with the official story (it was an accident! it was an accident!!!) -- both of these scenes do a really nice job of detailing how Kym's not the source of the family's problems but that she is really good at living up to the low expectations set for her in terms of personal responsibility, maturity and respect. I must say I really love how this film just goes there in terms of tough stuff of family dysfunction. The film is perhaps the most thoroughly frank depiction of what it feels like to be caught in such an emotional maze. That said, I regret that screenwriter Jenny Lumet had to go so "Oprah's Book Club" in defining the contours of the instantiating family tragedy. The film does what it can to alleviate the lameness of "the little brother that Kym killed" story (and almost does when Kym's caught in a past lie about a similarly hackneyed tale of child sex abuse) but the film can only do so much with this undefined spectral aspect of the story. I found the film to be really emotionally effecting. I identified, alternately, with Kym and with Rachel -- and I suspect the film will only work if the audience member finds one or the other or both to connect with. Without such clear point of empathetic identification, I suspec the film would not work very well at all. Anne Hathaway is really strong as Kym, a plausible terror and plausibly adorable. She does well capturing the addict's selfish immaturity even as she marks the startling shifts when Kym's not bullshitting but trying to follow a new impulse to tell the truth and deal with things. It's a vividly erratic depiction of the experience of early sobriety and Hathaway acquits herself with electrifying ease. Rosemary DeWitt is rock solid in the film's toughest role of Rachel. DeWitt's at her best when she's rooting for Kym and a little less clear when she's in her rage about Kym; it's a tough role and DeWitt is mostly good. Debra Winger in the truly supporting role of Abby is terrifying, a woman utterly confined within her own defensive, rageful pride. With comparatively scant screentime, Winger conveys both who this woman is and what it might be like to have had her as a mother (a contribution that places the rest of the narrative in important, clarifying relief). It's masterful work, haunting and complex without ever being ostentatious or mannered. Mather Zickel is adorable as the Sidney's best man and Kym's friend in recovery, and the scenes at the 12step meeting are apt, accurate and serve the narrative nicely as a platform for what might otherwise be interminable exposition. I found Bill Irwin good but strange; he seemed less like a person than a strange stage creature. All told, I admired this movie a lot, especially how so much emotional work was able to be conveyed with scant dialogue, against the various scenes of the wedding. The lengthy rehearsal dinner and wedding reception sequences worked in ways that I suspect are very distinctive to this movie -- incredible amount of intimate emotional terrain covered in comparatively scant amount of dialogue. It's a really good movie, emotionally challenging and frequently infuriating, but a really effective screen account of the intimate cruelties of family life.