Rachel Getting Married (2008)
Directed by Jonathan Demme
A young woman who has been in and out from rehab for the past 10 years returns home for the weekend for her sister's wedding.
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45 films that influenced Rachel Getting Married
What critics say influenced Rachel Getting Married
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.
For a moment, it feels as if Demme and Lumet are trying to conjure the supernaturalism of the unhappy Danish family get-together in 1998's "The Celebration."
Rachel Getting Married has more in common with the great Dogme film The Celebration than last year’s overacted Margot at the Wedding.
Quinn's freewheeling cinematography at times recalls Dogme films like The Celebration.
Director Demme shoots most everything with a dispassionate hand-held camera that evokes the fine Danish drama "The Celebration," which centered around a family reunion not unlike this one, captured the tense, dramatic events via a natural filmmaking style, and featured an actor, Ulrich Thomsen, who looks not unlike Bill Irwin here (Irwin plays the patriarch and his is a fine performance too, as is Rosemarie DeWitt's as the eponymous Rachel).
There is a lot of The Celebration, probably the best of all the Dogma films, in Rachel.
The Darwin chart of this breed of American indie, otherwise known as unlikely shrines to The Celebration (or Festen, if you prefer), follows in the United States with something like Margot at the Wedding near the top as most-evolved down mid-way to Rachel Getting Married and its histrionic Demme-tasse reduction, down to ankle-deep--we're talking primordial muck--with Dan in Real Life.
That was true of “Something Wild” and “The Silence of the Lambs,” in which terror and black comedy rolled together like dice, and it’s there in the mood swings of “Rachel Getting Married”—a minor work, but so menaced by distress that the characters take every opportunity to dance the dark away.
The buzz: Well received in its screenings at the Venice and Toronto film festivals, this latest film from “The Silence of the Lambs” Oscar winner Jonathan Demme has been hailed as a return to the comedic humanism of his early work like the classic “Something Wild.”
Not that the man who made Stop Making Sense was ever all that square, but Demme did make his name with small, intimate dramas about friendship and loneliness and the inexorable pull of family ties (Melvin & Howard, Something Wild).
Musicians on Demme's iPod, like Robyn Hitchcock (Storefront Hitchcock) and Sister Carol East (Something Wild), turn up to perform.
Although the handheld shaky-cam used to give the film an unnerving, voyeuristic, home-movie vibe would not have been an option early in Demme's career, "Rachel Getting Married" revels in the emotional chaos found in such 1980s films as "Melvin and Howard," "Something Wild" and "Married to the Mob," made before the Oscar/box-office double whammy of "The Silence of the Lambs" established Demme as a "prestige" director.
Working from a script by Jenny Lumet (actress and spawn of writer Gail Lumet Buckley and filmmaker Sidney Lumet), Demme choreographs a mostly accomplished ensemble to make his fiercest and most deeply satisfying film since Something Wild.
If this film had been made in conventional three-quarter-shot fashion with an overlaid music score, it might read like a groovier Ordinary People.
But neither of them is a match for her mother, Abby (Debra Winger) whose distance from her children is rivaled only by that of Mary-Tyler Moore in Ordinary People.
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Whether it’s W.C. Fields in It’s a Gift (1934), the murderous chainsaw-wielding clan in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), the Firefly bunch in House of 1000 Corpses (2003) or every family in every Wes Anderson picture, it’s a staple of the movies.
Rachel is about a wedding in the same sense that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is about a dinner party.
A quarter of a century after "Terms of Endearment," she's old enough to play the formidable mother now, instead of the difficult daughter, and her parent here is a complicated and dangerous character, so utterly closed off and controlled that when her anger comes, it's an explosion.
Along the way, we slowly gather insights into the characters - the fraught relationship between Kym and her father (Bill Irwin), and, especially, Kym and her mother (Debra Winger, who's retained a thing or two about withholding moms from "Terms of Endearment").
Although the handheld shaky-cam used to give the film an unnerving, voyeuristic, home-movie vibe would not have been an option early in Demme's career, "Rachel Getting Married" revels in the emotional chaos found in such 1980s films as "Melvin and Howard," "Something Wild" and "Married to the Mob," made before the Oscar/box-office double whammy of "The Silence of the Lambs" established Demme as a "prestige" director.
It's a shame, then, that Demme doesn't trust his deftness, saddling this intriguing chimera of Something Wild and Married to the Mob with well-trammelled Demme-as-auteur interludes that drag out, nonsensically, the corpses of Robyn Hitchcock and Sister Carol to cameo, grinding the whole shooting match to a halt at regular intervals.
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"Rachel Getting Married," his newest feature, is a return to the low-budget, low-stress roots of "Citizens Band" and "Melvin and Howard."
And at his best (Melvin and Howard, Crazy Mama, Citizen’s Band), Demme instinctively grasps the runaway anarchy of human relations, in this case the way hurt and loss ricochet around a troubled family like poisoned arrows for years.
Of course, this film is not by Robert Altman, but by Jonathan Demme, one of America’s great filmmakers, of a generation that came up behind the Altmans and others of the early 70s, who made his first high profile film, Melvin and Howard, one decade after Altman’s M*A*S*H*.
Although the handheld shaky-cam used to give the film an unnerving, voyeuristic, home-movie vibe would not have been an option early in Demme's career, "Rachel Getting Married" revels in the emotional chaos found in such 1980s films as "Melvin and Howard," "Something Wild" and "Married to the Mob," made before the Oscar/box-office double whammy of "The Silence of the Lambs" established Demme as a "prestige" director.
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.