In cinema there’s a subgenre or cross-genre to do with family gatherings at which members of said family congregate, perhaps for the first time in a while, for a big occasion. What tends to happen then is that new and old alliances are reformulated and family skeletons come clattering out the closet.
Sometimes the occasion is a funeral, or a gathering by the bedside of a moribund matriarch or patriarch, or a birthday party, but more often it’s a wedding. Wedding movies can take comic or tragic form, or, for that matter, can be tragicomic, which seems their natural state. Jonathan Demme’s movie Rachel Getting Married, scripted by Jenny Lumet, has as its precursors such films as Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen (though that’s a birthday, not a wedding), Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, and, as the granddaddy of this particular genre within a genre, Robert Altman’s A Wedding. Demme acknowledges Altman as an inspiration in the end-credits.
But Rachel Getting Married is not an Altmanesque film in the way A Wedding is; it hasn’t the multiple storyline or seething mass of characters at cross-purposes. It has some of Altman’s looseness, though: it has a hand-held camera or Steadicam following characters around, jiggling just enough to give us a sense of immediacy and vérité; it has dialogue that sometimes feels improvised, the jumbled discourse of people talking to, at or through one another.
What’s most different about Rachel Getting Married from the most Altmanesque of Altman’s movies, however, is that it has a clear protagonist from whose perspective we see most of the narrative. It’s her viewpoint and her experience, not to mention her conflicts as a character, that inform the shape and impact of the story. She’s Kym (Anne Hathaway), a lifelong drug addict who, at the start of the movie, gets a brief parole from rehab to attend her sister’s wedding.
Obviously the family is jittery about her presence and, despite her best attempts to grin and bear it, she manages rather well to live up to their worst expectations. When she arrives at the palatial family home and we see her mooching upstairs, cigarette in hand, we know she’s still the black sheep of the family and probably always will be — only the black sheep would smoke with quite such commitment.
This family is apparently very well off, and its members are planning a mega-wedding that incorporates days and nights of preparation and rehearsal. They and their in-laws seem to have connections to the music industry: the new son-in-law-to-be is a musician or singer, and Kym’s dad is a record-company executive, though we’re not told.
Either way, this context allows Demme to enrich the film with a wonderful use of music — something that was a trademark of his earlier, quirkier films (I’m thinking of Something Wild and Married to the Mob, particularly, though mention should also be made here of his Talking Heads concert film, Stop Making Sense). Demme’s touch for good music usage extends from the background sounds in Rachel Getting Married to the constant presence of a Gypsy-style violin group, which annoys the characters at one point, and on to the very touching use of a Neil Young song in the wedding ceremony itself. (I wasn’t so mad about Robyn Hitchcock, though.)
Such things do remind one of those earlier, quirky Demme films, the ones that seemed to carry an individual sensibility most strongly, before he detoured into the thriller blockbuster with Silence of the Lambs and then the big, self-consciously serious Philadelphia. There and in his remake of The Manchurian Candidate, he seemed to have lost the personal vision that made Something Wild and Married to the Mob such pleasures.
Rachel Getting Married feels like an attempt to return to the roots of his private inspiration, and it’s a small, intense and very well-made film. You might quibble with the way the family skeletons are invoked, as if there always has to be some dreadful primal trauma behind it all — the ordinary, banal goings-on of an ordinary family can provide just as much shit. But it works powerfully, if you stay with it; even the moments that make you cringe are meant to make you cringe. That’s how wedding speeches are.
Hathaway herself gives a great, very mature performance, deserving of her Oscar nomination. Those enormo-eyes are sunk in dark pools of make-up and weariness, and they transmit endless amounts of inner pain. Her angular face and skewed, slumped posture send similar, complex messages.
The performances around her are also very good: Bill Irwin as dad Paul, Rosemarie DeWitt as Rachel, and Debra Winger as estranged mother Abby deserve special mention. To my mind, Winger isn’t given as much to do as she could have been given, but she’s a very strong presence. It feels like this mother is the wellspring of much unhappiness in this family, and Winger gives a performance of restrained power and almost infinite suggestiveness.
Weddings are the traditional, Shakespearean conclusion to a comedy — in fact, that’s the definition of comedy. (Tragedies end in death, comedies in weddings, or, nowadays at least, the reunion kiss of the lead actors.) Understandably enough, wedding movies are often comedies, where obstacles abound but everything turns out okay in the end. Rachel Getting Married is brave enough to court tragedy, to build on it, while also often being very funny. It reminds us that life is sad, touching and worthy of laughter, all at the same time.