Demme’s Wedding a Rapturously Moving Affair
No matter what anyone tries to tell you, weddings are seldom easy. With Kym Buchman (Anne Hathaway) around, they’re virtually impossible. An addict in the middle of recovery, she’s visiting her family for the weekend to help her big sister Rachel (Rosemarie Dewitt) marry smart and sensitive musician Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe), and as if the planning and coordination for these nuptials wasn’t difficult enough now everyone has to deal with the extra emotional baggage this hurricane of young woman adds to the equation.
Anne Hathaway and Rosemarie Dewitt in Sony Pictures Classics' Rachel Getting Married
With Rachel Getting Married, director Jonathan Demme has crafted hit his first bona fide homerun since Silence of the Lambs won five Academy Awards back in 1991. This multi-layered drama of addiction and family strife is poignant, powerful and emotionally devastating. It’s also one of the most movingly loving pictures of the entire year, and while the road it travels is difficult and disturbing when the trip concludes the final destination is so loving I almost couldn’t wait to jump in the car and go on the journey again.
It all begins with Jenny Lumet’s complex and life-affirming screenplay. The daughter of Hollywood legend Sydney Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon, Network, Serpico), much like her father she has crafted an East Coast drama that feels electric and alive bristling with the multifaceted dynamics of people and places genuine and true. While I couldn’t always relate to the Buchman family somehow that never put a wall between us, and as they wandered closer to Rachel’s nuptials I’d almost felt like I’d been a part of their lives forever.
The startling intimacy of the pieces is one of the big reasons why. Demme brings his documentary background to the forefront and working with gifted cinematographer Declan Quinn (The Return) the pair achieve a loose, devil-may-care verisimilitude eschewing the tightly wound high-gloss esthetics too many melodramas employ.
More, the family at the center of all this is smart, edgy and at times infuriatingly irritating, yet somehow endearing and wonderful all at the very same time. The filmmakers never pull back from any of their more nescient qualities while still celebrating their more laudable ones, all of which allows the film to attain a level of profound certainty impossible to resist.
Hathaway is a revelation. I’ve always liked the young starlet but I admit I never once thought The Devil Wears Prada and Get Smart! headliner ever could have achieved something like this. There is a depth and passion to her performance that oozes lived-in authenticity, her work here hands-down one of the finest pieces of work I’ve seen from any actor – male or female – this year.
She is matched by the relatively unknown DeWitt. The “Mad Men” supporting player takes Rachel to a level I never saw coming, digging into every fiber of the woman’s being so completely she disappears into the role. There were times I hated the bride-to-be, other moments where I loved her more than anyone else in the picture, and when the ultimate tragedies are revealed and her final choices are made the scope of her sisterly devotion surprised and moved me to a place so revelatory I couldn’t help but shed an honest tear.
Those wanting to learn more about the supporting players wandering around the periphery, including Sidney and his tight-knit African American clan, will undoubtedly be disappointed, and Demme’s continued fascination with music of all genres and backgrounds can at times feel out of place and a bit too whimsical. For me, however, none of this proved to be a problem, the deliriously complicated stratums of the Buchman’s more than enough to keep me both fascinated and entertained.
There are other delights, not the least of which is the wondrous return of actress Debra Winger in a small but vital role that holds the entire picture in its icy grip from the very first moment she strides onscreen. I also think Tim Squyres’ (Lust, Caution) editing is some of the finest in the man’s Oscar-winning career. Demme directs with a finite, almost transient confidence that we haven’t seen from the filmmaker in regards to his narrative work in years, the picture achieving a lyrical ebullience that’s positively sublime.
Rachel Getting Married is one of the best pictures of the year. It is one of a handful of great works to come along in 2008 that has made me sit up straight in my seat and take notice beginning to end. I hated, loved and, most of all, deliriously enjoyed this dramatic feature in ways I feel like I haven’t in ages making it a movie I can’t wait add to my own library and revel in again.
- review reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle
Film Rating: êêêê (out of 4)
Additional Links
- Rachel Getting Married Theatrical Trailer
