‘Rachel Getting Married’: A Candid Few Days with the Family
- Director: Jonathan Demme
Running Time: 114 Minutes
Rated: R
- For: Heavy/family drama enthusiasts
- Not For: Romantics, cheery optimists
Marriage is regularly associated with joy and happiness as the couple cheerfully runs down the aisle, finally bound together at last. Films have explored this concept in many different ways from a comedic look at the lives of two wedding crashers or the confusing process of choosing the real father through the music of Abba. Some other films, however, also choose to explore some of less content moments such as Rachel Getting Married. Although it has some scenes of brightness, it is a fairly serious and affectionate look at a broken family and the bonds that connect them. This film is difficult to swallow at times, no thanks to its uneven rhythm, peculiar editing, and lack of attention to its periphery characters, but ultimately, it is emotionally well presented with some great unique touches that will be appreciated by attentive audiences.
Kym (Anne Hathaway), the main character in Rachel Getting Married, has just been released from rehab after several years, just in time for her sister’s, Rachel (Rosemarie Dewitt), wedding. However, her presence causes a stir among the family members from the happy yet suspicious Rachel to Paul (Bill Irwin), the chirpy and over-protective father, to Abby (Debra Winger), the mother who was never around, along with a host of other characters such as the bridegroom Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe). The family has to deal with learning everything about each other once again before Kym went into rehab while preparing for a unique and big wedding.
Demme’s intimate familial look, at first, does not work on a couple fronts. One of Rachel Getting Married’s goals has to do having a lot of little twists come in character development and plot progression, which is somewhat replicated within the film’s rhythm. However, instead of having the audience really feel with whomever the main character is at the time, there is an uneven sense of pacing that creates an air of confusion, especially in its final act where after a very emotional climax, the film seems to distrust itself and add on an appendix concerned with all the characters’ conclusions. However, the film does find a steady rhythm in the middle, which carefully builds up to an important plot reveal that ties up the film together.
Additionally, the film’s liberal use of a shaky cam cinematography spliced with erratic editing decisions detracts from the movie’s sought-after immersive experience. Trying to make the audience feel intimate with the family, Rachel Getting Married employs a shaky cam, which by itself, works as the camera focuses on characters’ faces and has a documentary/home movie feel. However, this is mixed with editing that feels too random and creates headaches rather than any emotion. An instance is a long edit tied together with a shaky cam shot of Kym and then changed to a quick two-second cut to Rachel that then goes back to the original shaky cam shot. Many times, the camera is too active.
Mixed together in all of this is the lack of any detail to the minor characters that are referred to quite often. Being a huge wedding, there are a bevy of seemingly memorable side players involved from the musical and overconfident groom, Sidney, to Carol, Kym’s bright but subdued stepmother. Unfortunately, these descriptions are about as much as audiences will garner since they are glanced over, even when they are in the room with the main cast. In a narrative-heavy film, this would not be as much of a problem since the story carries the burden of detail, yet Rachel Getting Married is very character-oriented affair and there feels like empty parts to the puzzle of understanding what makes the family work from these outsiders’ points of view. Its a shame that the audience does not get to learn about these outsiders’ perceptions of the family or why they feel and act the way they do that would have made the film very engaging.
What makes the film an amazing package, though, is its atmosphere choices, acting, and emotional resonance. Director Demme made some very interesting choices in setting up the atmosphere such as the color and sound design to sustain the various moods the film goes through. The film intelligently uses subdued color pallets to match the large, plant-driven landscapes of the Midwest and the usually tense and melancholic tones found within the film. Even more unique is the film completely using diegetic sound. Every source of sound design and music has a visible source and even referred to at points in the film. The band or musicians that provide the music are always mysteriously around key scenes and feels like the audience is eavesdropping with the band or the musicians at what the family is going through. It’s a pretty bold move in the 21st century but one that pays off to help capture the intensity of the scenes.
To complement the atmosphere is the amazing acting and screenplay. The cast is incredible, with Hathaway taking the most attention. Hathaway’s character is an exhausting endeavor of love with layers upon layers of character development. It can be pathetic to admirable to hilarious to melancholic all in the span of half an hour with still much more to be shown. Just as much, the rest of the cast hold their weight as well with very few of the actors ever really feeling emotionally phony. And that is probably the brilliance of the screenplay as well in keeping these characters so tangible and gray along with the constant emotional flush of the overall narrative. There are few moments where audiences will think that a part is too overdramatic or melodramatic. Instead, the words, emotions, and actions stem off from a seemingly real emotional weight with real problems and people. When Kym and Rachel fight about Paul’s overprotective nature of Kym, the fight is given weight in piecing together the shattered pasts of these individuals and the culmination in getting a wedding finished in time. The choice to hone in on just a few days of interaction creates a very intimate and emotionally heavy picture.
Rachel Getting Married takes a bit of time to establish itself and find its groove along with losing some steam in the final act. A shaky handycam cinematography style and odd editing choices produce more headaches and plodded out narrative points than needed. There are also some characters that are glanced over when their presences are constantly referred back to. However, the entire package is top-notch with performances that feel concrete and mesmerizing, such as Anne Hathaway who forgoes beauty for a complicated, angst young adult, and an amazing relationship the film has with the diegetic soundtrack and sound design that provides tactile feedback to the audience and cast members; a feature not-so-common today and effective in a film concerned with a short time span. Rachel is a candid look at a family relationship that is much more strained and deeper than it appears along with the amends necessary to move on. It’s a touching character study into a seemingly normal but dysfunctional family and one of the most relatable, emotional fictional films of 2008.
The Wie muses: **** out of *****
Rachel Getting Married Trailer
Ratings:
*****: Excellent
**** to ****½: Great
*** to ***½: Good
** to **½: Mediocre
* to *½: Bad
0 to ½: Terrible
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