RACHEL GETTING MARRIED
Directed by Jonathan Demme
Written by Jenny Lumet
Starring Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin
Classification: 14A
There is jagged pain, but joy too; there is love and simmering hatred, laughter and anger, feelings stripped bare and buoyed up. All these opposites compellingly co-exist in Rachel Getting Married. But there's an important omission too. Although the ghost of a past tragedy permeates every frame, not a single flashback appears. None is needed. Instead, like a compulsory guest at the head table, the past is constantly present and, as it does at every wedding, waits for its betrothal to the future - what we were marching down the aisle with what we might become. That's why the marriage ritual, filled with hope and fraught with anxiety, is so resonant, and never more than in Jonathan Demme's intriguing, disturbing, uplifting evocation. In fact, to watch this film is to engage in participatory art - for better and for worse, through sickness and in health, we're drawn deeply in.
Admittedly, many movies have employed the focused lens of a funeral or wedding to peer into the dysfunctions of a troubled family. But Demme, working from a nuanced script by Jenny Lumet (yes, Sidney's daughter), has forged a unique partnership of his own, linking the dramatic flair of his fictional features to the hand-held immediacy of his documentary work. The result combines close-up intimacy with an edge-of-your-seat tension that will have you leaning into the screen, often uncomfortable but always entranced.
The action - I use the word advisedly, this is an emotional-action flick - races over a weekend in an upscale Connecticut house, the site of both the wedding and the attendant turmoil. Granted temporary leave from her latest rehab centre, Kym (Anne Hathaway) shows up for her sister's nuptials toting a whole lot of baggage - an aborted career as an actress; a severe addiction to drugs; and direct responsibility for that tragedy's ghost. She was driving, stoned, when the car careened off the bridge, sparing her but killing her young brother Ethan. The child's death, we infer, led to the demise of her parents' marriage - each has since found another partner. Now this marriage has them all reuniting again, in the same house that used to be a home.
As Kym arrives, the place is alive with the bustle of activity and the strains of violins, guitars, saxophones. Paul the father (Bill Irwin) is a record executive, and counts musicians among his closest friends - they're on hand to provide the music for the wedding and thus, in a lovely display of diegetic sound, the score for the film. Sidney the groom (Tunde Adebimpe) is a musician too and later, poignantly, vows that he feels for his bride the same passion that he once thought only music could inspire. The bride is white, the groom is black, yet the script never mentions their difference in colour. Within this assembly, integration is a given, unworthy of comment. No, the disharmony is elsewhere, and that discord lies deep.
We hear it in the initial encounter between Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) and Kym, the "good" sibling and the bad. The exchange is sharp, because the responsible lamb shares with the black sheep the same quick mind and caustic tongue, a taste for irony with a sarcastic residue. And the lamb wants this day to herself, unsullied by her sister's chronic narcissism. Their bond is obviously strong, yet so are the accreted layers of anger and resentment. This is the complex stew that bubbles, then comes to a rolling boil at the rehearsal dinner - the first, and longest, of several extraordinarily intense sequences to come.
Intense, indeed. Handling his ensemble cast and their overlapping dialogue with Altmanesque dexterity, Demme sits us down at the table. We're right there for the gaiety spontaneous and forced, for the speeches gracious and cringe-making. Most distressingly, though, we're there for the feared yet inevitable moment when Kym seizes the microphone. She's a mass of good intentions gone horribly sour, unable to stop from embarrassing herself and everyone around her. Hathaway, who hinted at her potential in Brokeback Mountain, is a revelation in this scene, oscillating from bravado to brittleness, revealing the inner hell of a woman doubly mired in guilt, bearing the twin burdens of her addiction and her addiction's deadly legacy.
This charged sequence is a gateway leading to others equally raw. Like the sisters' confrontation, where DeWitt plays off Hathaway superbly, showing us the depth of Rachel's enmity, a hardened crust that she's unable or maybe just unwilling to soften. And like Kym's harrowing confession at a parallel gathering, an AA meeting, which she punctuates with this awful burst of candour: "Sometimes I don't want to believe in a God that would forgive me."
But not everything is gloom. As the wedding progresses, as the crowd swells, laughter can be heard, love can be felt, and there's always the music, an omnipresent gift. The point is not that darkness abounds, but that every emotion contains the seeds of its opposite, and the two can turn in a nanosecond. Watch for a scene that involves loading a dishwasher, where hilarity suddenly ends in despair. And watch for another with Kym and her mother Abby (Debra Winger), where empathy switches instantly to rage. Yet watch too for a silent and gorgeously still tableau, when the sinner returns with her sins compounded, only to find what she least expects - absolution, a literal cleansing from a forgiving hand.
But don't get too hopeful, at least not before pondering a final heartless moment. After the drinks have been drunk and the dances danced, the happy bride and her bruised sister reach out to a mother they've lost, and receive in return only a peck on the cheek that leaves the faintest trace of lipstick, just the shadow of a kiss. Some addicts bury their feelings in a fog of drugs, others in a thick haze of politeness; both are habits hard to kick.