At the Movies: Rachel Getting Married
If you’re up for a girls’ night out—light entertainment, gooey romance, frippery and layers of tulle—see a different movie or prepare yourself.
Rachel Getting Married is sooooo not fluff. It’s a surprisingly dark drama for those who enjoy character movies and a naturalistic interpretation of family, joy, grief and guilt. Another surprise: it comes from the director of Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia, Jonathan Demme. There’s no cannibalism or AIDS this time, but it’s a tense offering nonetheless.
Rachel does get married, but that’s not the whole story. Her sister Kym (Ann Hathaway) (Brokeback Mountain, Becoming Jane), a recovering addict, is released from rehab so she can attend. The outside world is a challenge for any homecoming addict, but more so when your vast Connecticut home is overflowing with strangers working on wedding preparations. Kym’s family welcomes her back, but she feels responsible for a past tragedy, and unresolved issues quickly bubble to the surface. Kym is serious about staying clean and genuinely regrets her past, but her self-centredness and instability make her reintegration a volatile process, often uncomfortable to watch.
It’s not all tension and angst, however. The wedding is a rich, modern fusion of ethnicities, faiths, ages and backgrounds. Rachel, a psychologist, marries Sidney, a black musician with a whole entourage of loving family and friends, and they all mix in harmony—literally, for their eclectic music becomes the movie’s informal score. Tunde Abimpe (playing Sidney) is a Nigerian-American actor and is the real-life lead singer of the real band TV on the Radio. It’s wonderful to wallow in the multicultural warmth and have the conflict centred elsewhere.
Demme revels in human idiosyncracies and doesn’t shy away from characters that frustrate, particularly at first. Well known for his Oscar-winners, he is lesser known for his non-fiction film-making, and this is his first fictional work since 2004. He opts for a simple, naturalistic style, virtually a home movie in which we become a guest or a family member, privy to the tender and tortuous moments as the event evolves. Demme likes to be surrounded by his own extended family; Bill Irwin (playing Kym’s father) is actually his friend and neighbour, and the marriage celebrant is his cousin. This all creates a sense of authenticity that amplifies emotional involvement.
The foundation, however, is the screenplay by schoolteacher Jenny Lumet. Director Sidney Lumet approached Demme about his daughter’s script, and Demme ran with it because of its disregard for formula and “bold approach to truth, pain, and humour”. Jenny’s Lumet’s sense of performance is probably genetic: her grandparents were singer Lena Horne, jazz legend Louis Jordan Jones, actor-director and actress Baruch and Eugenia Lumet, and her mother is writer Gail Lumet Buckley.
Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune called the film “a triumph of ambience,” and announced the primary cast (Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt as Rachel, Irwin, and Debra Winger as the distant mother) are “working at a very high level”. Winger demands attention from her very first scene. Hathaway was Oscar-nominated and collected several awards.
It’s not everyone’s cup of tea. It’s emotionally demanding, and the last third would have improved with tighter editing. But we don’t get to edit out the good or bad bits in life, and the film’s strength is its thirst for realism. It doesn’t answer all its own questions, it doesn’t resolve anything with clichés, and asks us to have faith that people who seem entrenched in their difficulties will grow and progress in their own ways. It’s an earnest, hard-working attempt to create a cinematic merger between fiction and reality.
Maria Polglase
Rachel Getting Married (M). The next screening at The Village Theatre will be held on Saturday 5 September at 7.30pm.
