Rachel Getting Married: Movie Review (2008)

Directed by Jonathan Demme, written by Jenny Lumet, 113 minutes, rated R.

Jonathan Demme’s “Rachel Getting Married” isn’t really about Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) at all. It’s about her screwed-up sister Kym (Anne Hathaway in her best performance to date), a smoky, trouble-making but ultimately well-meaning mess on leave from a rehab facility who has been on drugs and booze for so much of her life, she unfortunately claimed another life along the way.

Just who that is won’t be revealed here, but it drives the emotions in a movie happy to unleash them at any point, which is often.

Shot with a hand-held camera, which gives the movie an immediacy and an intimacy it otherwise might have lacked, Demme based the film on Jenny Lumet’s script. What he features here is the year’s most diverse cast, so much so that you half-expect the pending nuptials to be held at the United Nations instead of in the backyard of Rachel and Kym’s father, Paul (Bill Irwin), and their step-mother, Carol (Anna Deavere Smith).

This is, after all, a film about the complications that come when a clash of cultures collide in a home so broken, the foundation shakes the moment Kym steps inside.

Oh, everyone tries to make it work, at least initially, with co-dependent Paul rushing to give Kym food she doesn’t really want while the elephant in the room--Kym’s addictions, her time in rehab and now her time away from it--go strenuously ignored.

Some of the movie’s best scenes are, in fact, about this family going through the motions of what they think it means to be a happy family--they laugh so hard at hollow jokes and their few good memories, you know that laughter is doomed to eventually be caught in someone’s throat, which it is.

After all, before long, Kym’s loose mouth and shattered self-esteem are testing the waters to see just where she stands with her family now. To do so, she picks fights, she drops bombs, she sleeps with the best man (also a recovering addict), she needles Rachel and others, she scratches at wounds so deep, they’ll never heal, and she isn’t really surprised to realize that she’s the one doing most of the bleeding.

That’s pretty much how it’s always been for Kym. There’s a side of her that craves those familiar lows, while another side no longer wants any part of them. It’s her struggle to get to that healthy part of herself that “Rachel Getting Married” really is about, but it won’t be easy, particularly given Kym’s difficult relationship with her distant mother, Abby (a superb Debra Winger); her strained relationship with Rachel, who resents Kym for always stealing attention away from her, particularly now on her wedding day; and all the other people she has hurt along the way.

While parts of the movie feels false and manufactured, that’s never true for Hathaway’s performance, which provides the necessary jolt of reality and isolation in a film whose family would seemingly prefer as little of that as possible. And it’s also never true when Winger enters into the equation. Her mean mouth and calculating eyes go a long way in explaining why Kym turned out the way she did, and why this family is as screwed up as it is.

Grade: B-