Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married is one of those films that is just so perfectly watchable. If it's on TV, I will pretty much drop everything and watch it, even though I own it. Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) may be the one getting married, but our main character is her younger sister, Kym (Anne Hathaway). Kym is picked up from rehab by her father (Bill Irwin) and stepmother and begins to disrupt the weekend right away, beginning by demoting the maid of honor and giving a terrible, selfish toast at the rehearsal dinner. We are immediately thrown into the family dynamic, and boy is there a lot of emotion and dysfunction in this upper middle class, perfect-looking family.
Hathaway gives her soul up to Kym. You know that raw emotion Hathaway had in the “I Dreamed a Dream” sequence in Les Miserables? I find this performance even more heart wrenching. Demme smartly shows us right away why Kym is the way she is, which allows us to understand her and like he even though her behavior can be infuriating. As a teenager, she was troubled, doing drugs and struggling with an eating disorder. Her mother left her in charge of her younger brother, and Kym accidentally killed him in a car accident. Her anguish and guilt over his death is fully realized, and it gives you incredible sympathy for Kym. She feels like she is going to be paying for this her whole life. Kym could so easily be horrendous, but she is so fully realized and Hathaway shows us her good qualities, how funny she is, how warm she can be, and how badly she wants to change her behavior. But, expectations and her own guilt prevent her over and over again.
The last two paragraphs might make Rachel Getting Married sound like an incredible downer, and yes, there are moments that are uncomfortable, trying, and tragic. But Jonathan Demme imbues the film with such vitality, and the moments of joy are just as urgent as the moments of anguish. The camera seems to roam freely throughout the home, following the family but also giving glimpses of the wedding preparations, giving the film an energy of excitement and preparation. He also uses diagetic music perfectly, the wedding celebrations involve incredible musical performances but also the musicians are friends and family practicing around the house, and we have roving bands of different types of musicians playing in the background. It's not distracting, its just natural and adds to the feeling that we are flies on the wall to this family’s weekend. Demme treats all of the characters with such humanity that there isn't one weakly drawn character in the ensemble; from Rachel's family to the wedding party to the guests, each character gets respect and they all seem like they have lived before the film and will keep living after it. One of my favorite performances is very small but a perfect example of Demme's humanity. While at a hair appointment with her sister, a man approaches Kym. He tells her they were at rehab together a few years ago. We learn that in rehab Kym made up a terrible story in a group therapy exercise. This man is so thankful to her and thanks her for sharing and for helping him with his sobriety, it is a heartbreaking moment. The guy is basically a device to cause Rachel to get completely fed up with her sister’s behavior and starts a fight involving her whole family, but Demme doesn't treat it that way, and the actor who plays the man at the salon is just so emotive and real that you can't ever forget his face.
Demme is juggling a lot of balls in the film but keeps them all up perfectly. We have to acquaint ourselves with Kym's different dynamics with every member of her family and the wedding party. We have Kym's struggle to connect with her estranged mother (Debra Winger). The scenes between Hathaway and Winger are maybe the most uncomfortable in the whole movie because Kym's mom just seems to hate her and seems like she almost wants to forget her family. There is also Kym's relationship with her father, Paul. Bill Irwin is a revelation in this film: he is the happy father of the bride, but also the very worried father of Kym, and the grieving father of the son he lost. Irwin imbues Paul with everything you want in a father, he is so caring and so, so sweet but really smart and funny and you can see the joy he has for his family radiating in his face. The scene where he and his soon to be son in law, Sidney, compete to see who can load the dishwasher the best is perfectly executed, and Irwin goes from competitive to elated to devastated so naturally. I won't spoil the end of this scene, but it’s like watching a bubble burst, from compete joy to utter sadness in a second. And it seems so natural. I also love the peripheral romantic entanglement Rachel has with the best man (of course, right?). They only have a few scenes together, but the chemistry is palpable, and Mather Zickel is incredibly charming.
And finally, with Rachel, there is resentment but great sympathy for her sister's situation, but also anger that this weekend is again being dominated by Kym. Rosemary DeWitt is wonderful, bringing to life the older sister who is trying to hold everything together. The wedding scene in this movie is probably one of my favorite weddings ever in cinema. Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe), Rachel's fiancée, sings his vows to her in a Neil Young song "Unknown Legend". This moment is incredibly emotional and evocative, but the song doesn't seem like a traditional love song and doesn't even seem to fit in the moment at first, but somehow Adebimpe completely sells it and gives the relationship between Sidney and Rachel that has been mostly in the background, obscured by family drama, a real weight, and there is no way to watch it without crying, I'm just warning you.
Rachel Getting Married is a movie I have been meaning to highlight on this blog since the beginning. I saw this movie in the theatre in 2008 (at the old Metro in the U District!), and I literally cried almost the whole movie. Some were sad tears and some were happy but I walked out knowing I loved this movie. And, in a way, it’s a really easy movie to talk about because the script by Jenny Lumet is incredibly strong, and the acting is great and Demme is bringing amazing, exciting, almost Dogme 95 energy to the film. So, all this should make it easy to write about, but I found it incredibly hard to explain not why you should watch this movie, but why I love it. This movie just hits me in the gut and I don't know why. I can't particularly relate to Kym or Rachel and the family isn't like mine at all. But the movie hits me equally hard every time I watch it: it's emotionally exhausting but leaves you feeling gratitude and hope. Sometimes you can't say why something touches you so deeply it just does. And it isn't just the expertly made film, there is something deeper that you can't put your finger on. It's like the song Sidney sings in the wedding scene. It doesn't seem to match up to their life but the emotion is there, deep and vital and universal. That's Rachel Getting Married.
Julie
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