November 12, 2008: Rachel Getting Married
The buzz about this film is all about former Disney princess Anne Hathaway turned gritty “real actress”. She plays a recovering addict (Kym) on leave from a treatment centre for a few days to attend the New England backyard wedding of her sister. Of course, all is not smooth sailing in the days leading up to the wedding, with family and friends coming together to spend time with each other while stressing out over final preparations, and nobody quite knows how to treat Kym in her current state.
Anne Hathaway has been breaking out of her mold over the past few years, after not being paid much attention in her earlier unchallenging Disney roles (my judgment of those roles is complete hearsay – I’ve never seen the Princess Diaries films). Havoc was a low-budget teen angst story about rebellious girls hanging out with troublemakers and getting into trouble themselves, which I have also not seen. Brokeback Mountain was a confluence of some great talent (Best Director winner Ang Lee directing Hathaway, Michelle Williams, Heath Ledger, and Jake Gyllenhaal along with a few other key supporting performers), and a huge critical success also conveniently buoyed by controversy. The Devil Wears Prada was a chance for Hathaway to demonstrate that she can carry a comedy-drama as a lead, against the formidable Meryl Streep (come Oscar time, Streep was the one who got the lead-actress nomination, in what I thought was a Wall Street-esque supplanting of the apparent lead by the more famous actor, although in Wall Street I think it was appropriate). Now, she has become the face of Rachel Getting Married, with good reason.
Of course, director Jonathan Demme isn’t the “face” of the film but he’s the driving force behind the vision and the aesthetic. Perhaps best known as an Oscar-winner for The Silence of the Lambs, Demme has been in the business for over 30 years. From his inauspicious beginnings with Caged Heat (a “women in prison” movie – not to be confused with the later Chained Heat, another “women in prison” movie starring The Exorcist’s Linda Blair), in my mind he came to real attention with Melvin and Howard, a 1980 film about a man believing himself to be the heir to Howard Hughes, which incidentally won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Mary Steenburgen. In the early 1990s he came to the forefront as a real A-list Hollywood director with Best Picture winner The Silence of the Lambs, followed shortly thereafter with the Tom Hanks Oscar winner Philadelphia. He’s bounced around in various projects for the past 15 years and has now directed a sparse, back-to-basics character-driven film.
The film appears to have been shot almost in the Dogme 95 style, with handheld cameras, no significant artificial lighting, and without music. I think that added to the intimacy and legitimacy of the story, which is essential if we are to care about this bunch of characters. There were some striking missteps in the acting in the first half-hour, reunions among old friends telling stories where the enthusiasm and the laughter frankly seemed forced. However, an hour into the movie, these concerns were gone and everyone had settled into a nice groove. Not that they were necessarily having a good time, mind you, but the happiness and the sadness were believable. I found myself wondering at the process of acting, and what acting really is, as these individuals are in a position where they need to interpret and portray the feelings of someone who doesn’t exist, and be unself-conscious about it all. Many people think they could be actors and that the job is dead simple, but I think for most people it would be very difficult to conjure up those emotions and lay them on the table in service of a story that isn’t real.
The particulars of how the wedding goes, and the details of the arguments they have before, during and after the big day, are not ultimately what’s important. The importance of family, and of supporting people in distress, comes through clearly.
One scene I have to highlight in particular centres around loading the dishwasher after dinner one night. The father and the son-in-law-to-be have been playfully ribbing each other for days about the proper technique for getting the greatest number of dishes in, and this culminates in a timed competition with the whole family egging them on. Dishwasher loading technique is something I put perhaps a pathetic amount of pride in, and to see it portrayed in a film reminds me that while many things in movies are cliched and common, it’s because a movie needs to connect in a special way with its audience, and common things are more likely to connect with more people. It’s certainly manipulative, but it’s necessary within the constraints of the medium. The way that scene ends also reminds us that Kym is not the only person in this family who is haunted by past events.
As of this writing, Rachel Getting Married is one of the Oscar unknowns, but it’s got the potential to be heavily favoured. This is certainly a movie with flaws, but it’s an honest look at the way some families tick.
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