Rachel Getting Married (2008)
Grade:B
We’ve long suspected that Anne Hathaway had a pretty great performance in her, so thank God director Jonathan Demme cast her as Kym in Rachel Getting Married, a film full of naturalistic, spot-on performances from Hathaway, Debra Winger, Rosemarie DeWitt, and the rest of the sprawling cast. Demme seems to be in experimental mode with his shooting style, though, opting for what looks like digital cameras and a handheld fly-on-the-wall style that is intended to add immediacy and verisimilitude to the proceedings. It’s almost successful, but regardless of the misgivings with the style, the performances are universally strong and make the film worth seeing.
On the eve of Rachel’s (DeWitt) wedding, her sister Kym (Hathaway) is released from rehab for the weekend for the occasion. Rehab is nothing new for Kym, nor is dealing with the troubled Kym anything new for her family, yet they still manage to unearth family secrets and deep-seeded hurt, largely centering on a tragedy in the family’s past. Kym and Rachel’s parents are divorced, and their father (Bill Irwin) seems to be overcompensating for a troubled daughter by simply ignoring the issues at hand and over-parenting his children even in their adulthood. Rachel and Kym’s mother (Debra Winger) is simply out of the picture, showing up late for the rehearsal dinner and being one of the first to leave the reception.
Reading that general outline of the plot perhaps gives too little credit to the screenplay from first-time writer Jenny Lumet, who crafts an admittedly basic Family In Crisis plot, but writes so much depth into these characters that the potentially rote themes at play bring on a new complexity. Credit the actors, too, for delivering such note-perfect performances and bringing such depth and nuance to their roles.
But there is that damned shaky camera to be addressed. Perhaps that’s a bad way to start, because shaky cameras are just fine (hey, Cloverfield got an A around these parts), and digital video is just fine, and long takes are great, and natural lighting is tops, and to a certain extent, these documentary elements contribute to the story. It feels like Demme and cinematographer Declan Quinn go way too far with their approach, though. Members of the wedding party have cameras in their hands, and rather than being part of the diegesis as though friends and family are filming home movies, we occasionally cut to this footage, too, calling into question whether or not the primary camera is omniscient, or whether this is simply the filmmakers’ version of a wedding video.
Well, I was a wedding videographer for nearly two years through college. And while Rachel Getting Married does ultimately play like the most interesting and intimate wedding video I never shot, my main problem with this is that it isn’t a wedding video – it’s a movie. From my perspective, there are cinematic conventions for a reason. It’s sort of the equivalent of punctuation in writing. Like punctuation is meant to guide the reader without the reader being aware they’re being guided, cinematic conventions of storytelling are there as a set of ways to tell a story visually that a viewer can understand without having to be aware of them. We shouldn’t be seeing the filmmakers when we watch a movie, we should be absorbing the story, and while that’s happening most of the time here, there are other jarring moments when we’re instead paying attention to the camera and the fact that it can’t flippin’ focus or the fact that the musical performances at the reception are going on and on and on.
Regardless, though, the performances are all strong, the story an interesting one, and with the ease of interaction between all the actors paired with the wedding video documentary style, it seems like the actors learned all their lines for the entire movie, moved into a house for a weekend with cameras around and just acted out the movie in one long take that eventually got edited down. So on that front, I suppose the movie is objectively successful, in spite of my reservations about the approach taken. When all is said and done, each and every actor inhabits their role fully, and none of these actors seem to be acting, which is no small feat to accomplish on film.
It would be interesting to see how this movie would play with a more straightforward visual approach. I don’t know if it would necessarily be any better, but I think we’d be able to pay more attention to the story and notice the wonderful moments of interaction between the characters instead of noticing that there’s dust on the camera lens or that the lighting is uneven. Yeah, as a wedding videographer, I can safely say that those things sometimes happen when you take a fly-on-the-wall approach and show up with a video camera to an unknown location. But my wedding videos weren’t fictional, didn’t have production budgets, and didn’t star Anne Hathaway or Debra Winger.
Bottom Line:
The acting is across-the-board superb, and the style across-the-board pissed me off. Toss up!
© 2004-2009 Ben Waldorf. Posted November 06, 2008. IMDB
jeez ben, didn’t anyone tell u that it’s not good to watch so much tv? :)
— jenna p Nov 7, 05:06 AM #