Movie review: 'Rachel Getting Married'

Anne Hathaway (Credit: Sony Classics)

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3 1/2 stars (out of four)

A triumph of ambience, “Rachel Getting Married”  is the first narrative feature since the 1980s from director Jonathan Demme  that feels like a party—bittersweet, but a party nonetheless.

It’s not a remake of a Hollywood standard  such as “The Truth About Charlie,”   Demme’s riff on “Charade,”   or “The Manchurian Candidate,”   and although Demme’s Oscar-winning work on “The Silence of the Lambs”   did wonders for his industry   cachet, I’ll never love that movie the way I love the Demme films no one else could’ve made, the ones heralding an off-center chronicler of the human comedy. “Melvin and Howard”  is what I’m talking about, or the Christine Lahti  scenes in “Swing Shift,”  or the best stuff in “Married to the Mob,”   where Michelle Pfeiffer  blossomed into a crack comic actress before your eyes.

The “Rachel Getting Married” script could’ve been filmed any number of ways, most of them leading straight to the Lifetime channel. Demme shoots it like a documentary about a sublime wedding crossed with an uneasy family reunion. It’s all done with hand-held high-def digital video cameras, on the prowl. Screenwriter Jenny Lumet  has a penchant for “Playhouse 90” -type confrontations, which may be a genetic inevitability, given who her father is: director Sidney Lumet,  who made his bones in ’50s television. 

But the way Demme and cinematographer Declan Quinn  finesse the material, big scenes come and go with unusual rapidity, while details other directors would’ve glossed over—a series of wedding toasts, for instance, or a parade of samba dancers—are lingered over, lovingly.

The protagonist, Kym,  is played as an insolent, wary bundle of nerves by Anne Hathaway.  In the film’s first minute we’re told that Kym is responsible for killing someone years ago in a car accident. Lumet keeps the details sketchy at the outset. Nine months into her latest rehab stay, the recovering alcoholic  and  drug addict, who apparently has done some modeling in her teen years, is being let out of “the big house” to attend her sister Rachel’s  wedding at her family home—a dream of a rambling old Connecticut manse, with a big green lawn and a swirl of hidden tensions.

Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt,  superb in her delineations of anger and affection) dreads sister Kym’s return.   The father, played by the masterly stage actor Bill Irwin,  hovers sweetly but persistently around Kym, watching for signs of a potential relapse, perpetually carrying a plate of something (“You guys hungry?”). Dad is on his second marriage (Anna Deavere Smith,   with too little to do, plays his current wife). The girls’ mother, also remarried, is played by Debra Winger,   and the second this imperious character appears onscreen you sense a certain amount of medication masking a certain amount of unresolved pain. And you suspect that this magnificent performer should do more films.

Demme’s documentaries have prepared him well to tackle a narrative feature in this fashion, though other influences abound: the French New Wave, the ebb and flow of Robert Altman’s  ensemble explorations (though “A Wedding”   was pretty minor Altman). Also, Demme draws from the stripped-down Dogma  school and the recent films inspired by the Dogma wave. Susanne Bier’s   bracing “After the Wedding”  seems to be a touchstone. We scurry after Kym from rehab to wedding rehearsal dinner to spontaneous, combustible reunion with her mother, one of the year’s most memorable short, sharp shocks.

When Mather Zickel,  who plays a 12-step colleague of Kym’s, talks about “missing the drama” of his addict days, he may well be speaking for audiences accustomed to movies that behave more like movies and less like life. Well, it worked for me. A more head-on interpretation of Lumet’s script would’ve been a bit of a chore, and Demme’s spinnin’-round-the-FM-dial musicology makes him the best possible   DJ  for any multiethnic wedding.

Contrary to its dubious R rating (a little rough language  and tiny smidge of fully clothed sex), the sisterly dust-ups and familial ups and downs of “Rachel Getting Married” would likely appeal to the average adventurous teenager as much as the average Demme fan. Hathaway, DeWitt, Irwin and especially Winger are working at a very high level. So is their director. His intuition regarding how to film this particular milestone event, and the stories unfolding in the margins, turned out to be just right.

mjphillips@tribune.com

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