A Wedding (1978)
Directed by Robert Altman
Muffin's wedding to Dino Corelli is to be a big affair. Except the ageing priest isn't too sure of the ceremony, only the families actually turn up as the Corelli Italian connection is suspect, security guards watch the gifts rather over-zealously, and Dino's grandma expires in bed just as the reception starts. Could be quite an occasion.
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What critics compared A Wedding to
Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, from a screenplay by Jenny Lumet, is said to have been inspired by Robert Altman’s satirically free-wheeling A Wedding (1978), and probably by Ms. Lumet’s own experiences in an interracial family.
Though clearly modeled on Robert Altman’s A Wedding (1978) (in fact, Altman is acknowledged in the credits), Demme’s film is at bottom a pretty basic dysfunctional-family movie—a subgenre of which there’s never been any shortage.
Like real marriages, marriage-themed films, all the way from Robert Altman’s quirky, star-infested A Wedding to the recent indie clunker Margot at the Wedding, can be an iffy thing.
Director Jonathan Demme acknowledges his admiration for Robert Altman's film A Wedding , and we see evidence of that in the free-floating cinematic style of the drama along with the playfulness of so many musical interludes.
Director Jonathan Demme stylistically, and in the credits, salutes Altman in Rachel Getting Married, but instead of Altman�s class-conscious A Wedding, Demme focuses on family as the place where, when you have no where else to go, they have to take you in.
With its rambling plot carved from the minutiae of details, its overpopulated landscape of neurotic characters, its speeded-up handheld camera tricks and its overlapping music and dialogue, Rachel Getting Married cannot fail to remind you of every Altman, from Nashville to A Wedding, but I didn’t find it as annoying and self-indulgent as those films, and to my taste, it’s a great deal more engaging.
Altman is renowned for assembling top-notch ensemble casts (Short Cuts, Nashville, A Wedding, H.E.A.L.T.H, etc) and Gosford Park sits comfortably alongside his best work.
After a flurry of masterpieces in the early '70s, the Altman of the late '70s and '80s often let his counterculture ire get the best of him, taking too-easy potshots at the characters in Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), A Wedding (1978), H.E.A.L.T.H. (1979), and many other films.
When working with lesser scripts that paraded the quirkiness of characters in place of personality (think A Wedding and Health, all that was left was color and cleverness.