Friday
17Oct2008
Movie Review - 'Rachel Getting Married'
Friday, October 17, 2008 at 12:05AM | Rachel Getting Married
Starring Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, and Debra Winger  |
In
Rachel Getting Married,
Anne Hathaway
shows a lot of sides we've never seen her portray. I'll stop short of saying
it's a command performance, but it's clearly the best acting she's ever done.
There is something fractured in her portrayal of Kym that I highly suspect does
not exist in the real Anne Hathaway.Kym is an addict. I have no idea how old she is in the movie, probably close to the actress' real age of 25, but she has been on the wrong side of drugs and alcohol since her early teens. We know this because most of the film's best and most devastating scenes deal with a family tragedy that occurred when Kym was a 16-year-old junkie.
But it's supposed to be a positive weekend; after all, her sister Rachel is, as the title suggests, getting married. Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) is the good daughter. She's a year-and-a-half from her Ph.D. in psychology, she's marrying a wonderful man, and she's moving to Hawaii. Kym loves her sister but is a disappointment and Rachel loves her sister but is disappointed. So is their mother (Debra Winger), who is one of those movie characters that can say all you need to know about her just by making her first entrance.
Director Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia) presents this film like a homemade wedding video, the sort of thing somebody pops into the VCR four years later, only to have the reality of the moment rain on their more positive memories. And Demme has made a lot of artistic decisions here you might not expect: Rather than explore the more dramatic elements in every scene and explode them onto everyone attending the large wedding, we see 15 to 20 minutes of a rehearsal dinner, with characters we never hear from before or again praising the couple. We hear the wedding band tuning up and going over their material for the following day. We become guests of the wedding ourselves rather than a movie audience.
That Hathaway gives us a performance of this caliber is not a tremendous surprise, although her character is. There is one blistering moment between her and Debra Winger that might be seen over and over at awards shows this winter. I also very much enjoyed DeWitt's portrayal of Rachel, and was glad to see that she wasn't reduced to "the sister" here.
In his review, Roger Ebert says he believes the film's real subject is the wedding and not how Kym does or does not come to grips with her many, many personal demons. He might be on to something. I viewed it the other way, that what makes this story worth telling isn't the wedding but Kym's often clumsy baby steps towards recovery. I think I would've enjoyed the film more watching it his way, but I think I learned more about the characters - and Anne Hathaway - watching it my way.
Reader Comments (1)
I call this "much ado about nothing"