Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Rachel Getting Married
A rollercoaster usually doesn’t last long. You’re guaranteed to get thrills and those butterflies that float around inside the stomach as you fly down the dips. You try and take it all in but it’s useless because it goes by all too quickly. But you still try anyway because you know you only have the given moment. A Connecticut home, full of people with different backgrounds and ethnicities, housing a wedding and the receptions that come with it, finds itself on the tracks of a rollercoaster that has the possibility of being derailed. With that in mind, each person present at this party tries real hard to enjoy the moment that’s full of music, family traditions and love. One character in particular, the bride, doesn’t realize all that was in front of her until the wedding has now become something of the past. By the time the end credits roll along she reminded me of Michael Corleone, the distraught human soul, at the end of Godfather Part II.What makes a family useful is its ability to caress and refurbish painful predicaments and decaying wrongs. Director Jonathan Demme’s portrait of a young woman dealing with the pain that comes along with being human is intriguing because she goes through life having to deal with being supervised all the time and her fragile emotions are constantly picked at such a nagging pace by family members, whose affections she would have rather greeted instead. This is Demme's forte; fascination with the social outcast. We've seen that worked to perfection in his greatest film, "Silence of the Lambs."
The young woman is Kym (Anne Hathaway) and she’s been released from a rehab center. She has been in and out for ten years and results are visible. She gets the opportunity to be in attendance at her sister Rachel’s wedding at their father’s home. Kym returns home to find a celebration in the making, not for her return, but for the wedding which will be a wedding that hasn’t been captured before on celluloid. What her return home does is serve her a reminder of her haunted memories, and minor indications of a brighter future. Hathaway manages to wipe away the sexiness and beauty that layered her face in previous films in order to replace it with a pale and skinny face that is searching for a soul. Her tour-de-force performance steers the movie away from melodrama and towards a near classical narrative.
The Connecticut home is bursting with energy. A homey estate that belongs to a family of disconnected souls. It homes a dysfunctional child trying to cope with her personal struggles, Kym, and a child who abides by the everyday rules. The abiding child is named Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) and she’s getting married to Sydney (Tunde Adebimpe), an African American musical guru who has a face that announces redemption. The bride and groom’s families couldn’t be more different when it comes to appearances and traditions. Demme goes for the unnatural approach by not focusing on the interracial marriage. He doesn’t even give the slightest hint at it, scoffing it off for a lesser director to approach such a cliché. This results in the film being more truthful than it plans to be. More truth is found in this technique than the handheld device Demme uses to track each member of the family. Yet it’s with the shaky camera that he uses to distract us from the interracial marriage. His movement from room to room, person to person is Altamnesque. Every character the lens focuses on is worth listening to. The reception dinner is a perfect example of this. No matter who is doing the talking we can’t help but to only be lulled along like we have known these people for the most part of our lives.
This wedding, so unorthodox and elaborate, mounts to form an isolated island around Rachel. Constantly yelling and harassing her sister for her entire stay, the father (Bill Irwin), a weak man who may take the tragic past harder than anyone in the family, finds himself in the middle of an ongoing sibling rival that recalls to mind The Prodigal Son tale. If his soul isn’t being gnawed at by the past, it’s certainly gnawing at his divorce from his first wife Abby (Debra Winger). She’s a firecracker waiting to be ignited so she can showcase her explosions and vent steam.
If there’s a flaw in Demme’s film, and there is, it’s contained within the characters of the two sisters, Rachel and Kym. Though each actress, Hathaway and DeWitt, give great performances, their characters are focused too much on arguing with each other. It almost gets to the point that as we watch the movie we become familiar and comfortable with the families in it, and then it clicks; it seems as if the audience is being used. Just as we nestle up real snuggly to the family and feel welcomed, most of the characters then begin to spill their guts out to us. Almost as if they use the audience as a ploy in order to unleash their furies and dilemmas. We’re the lucky psychiatrist who has the fortune of listening to some real rubbish and even some entertaining stories by patients who are basket-cases.
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