Right off, the timing seems precarious: on the cusp of her big sister’s wedding day, Kym (Anne Hathaway) is picked up from rehab, chain smoking, nervously catty, clearly feeling jinxed by the pressure not to fuck everything up. Emma (Anisa George), the maid of honour, keeps telling Kym that it’s not all about her, and you soon want to swat Emma and tell her it’s not all about brownie points with the bride either. But Kym is self-absorbed, by nature of the 12-step recovery process if not also simply by nature. In her family narrative she has been designated as both the hurricane and its eye. The speech she improvises at the rehearsal dinner keeps swerving so uneasily into colossal public embarrassment without quite tipping over as to be a kind of feat of suspense. The feeling here of being almost out of control is beautifully controlled by Hathaway, by director Jonathan Demme, by cinematographer Declan Quinn, with his stability-crashing handheld camera, and by everyone else in the room for this scene, sitting there trying not to let the panic show. It’s a brilliantly measured early set piece and a sort of emotional weather report on what’s to come.
So we’ve got two sisters, the crazy one and the titular, reasonable one (Rosemarie DeWitt), getting married and getting a PhD in psychology, and leery of being upstaged for the umpteenth time. We’ve got two divorced parents, the outgoing, worrying, slightly manic but clearly loving father (Bill Irwin) and the quietly radiant but finally remote mother (Deborah Winger), the former champing at the bit to welcome Kym home and make nice with everyone, the latter amiable but comfortably outside of the proceedings, as ultimately bottled up as her ex is potentially hysterical. And we’ve got an absent family member, too, a third sibling long dead yet seemingly lingering everywhere they turn—the wedding is to be held in the family house. For everything to be truly resolved by the end of Rachel Getting Married Hathaway would have to no longer be the star, and Winger would have to let go of more backed up vitriol than the movie’s compact timeline and fearsome integrity could probably bear. But tidy resolutions are antithetical to Rachel Getting Married. Women punch each other in the face here, but that's only the start of a conversation to be continued in the future. As written by Jenny Lumet, the abundant humour and familiar narrative devices—I use that adjective in both senses—get us settled into our seats, but the sensitively observed details that bring this story rushing to unruly life are anything but settling.
Hathaway’s Kym seems resentful above all of her own neediness, her large, dark eyes holding an inner turmoil that’s trying to keep up appearances under scrutiny. DeWitt’s Rachel is at once lovely and righteous and eager to descend from her typical stance as moral superior to be the selfish one for once. Her calm is so well-practiced she can barely escape it. The pair's ongoing exchange of roles is the dramatic meat of the story, with Irwin touchingly scrambling to support both at once, and Winger coolly resigned to stand behind the line she’s drawn between her and both daughters. It's a casting coup, to be sure, her hiding nature so perfectly dove-tails into that of Winger the actress and one-time Hollywood siren.
As for the others, of which there are many, lively supporting players among them, they fall beautifully in line with Demme's rigorous ensemble design. I don’t know whether or not Lumet’s script had Sydney (Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio), Rachel’s fiancé, be a musician, or had the guest list be brimming with countless other wildly diverse and enormously talented musicians, but, if it wasn’t actually his idea, I’ll bet Demme—director of Stop Making Sense and Neil Young: Heart of Gold—felt right at home with this very shrewd conceit. There is no underscoring, instead, diegetic music fills Rachel Getting Married, with everyone from Demme’s guitar playing teenage son to Robyn Hitchcock seemingly always playing or rehearsing somewhere within earshot of the action, creating a stirring, sometimes humorous counterpoint to whatever’s happening. Music gives an aesthetic unity to the story that helps support its necessary loose ends, and when, after a harrowing detour, the party finally starts, the whole movie just surrenders to it, filling up on movement and colour and celebratory gestures. Demme knows we’ve all earned it by that point, the characters and the audience, and the sense of release is tremendous, if fleeting, and always slightly tempered by cutaways to Anne, so well-behaved as to break your heart a little. The next morning comes, a lot has changed, but changes take time to work themselves out, so the note we part on is calmer, bittersweet, and deeply satisfying.
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