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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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.
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.
Demme's owes much to his editor, Tim Squyres, who also edited Altman's " Gosford Park ," another film that kept track of everyone at a big house party.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
You made one heck of a thriller, “The Silence of the Lambs,” back in 1991 and inspired a slew of hyper-stylized detective thrillers such as “Seven.”
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.”
Under the direction of Jonathan Demme, best known for his meticulous character studies in "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Philadelphia," "Rachel Getting Married" attempts to delve into the relationship between the two sisters and their seesaw battle for sanity and meaning.
Demme’s direction, except for the indulgences mentioned above, shows the expertise fitting the Oscar winner (for “The Silence of the Lambs”).
Demme also has a knack for drawing out fine performances (see: "The Silence of the Lambs") and Hathaway is the best she's been.
Demme seems to be a kind and hopeful man who wants to make people feel good — and though, given the choice, I’d rather be watching his more versatile and joyful musical creation, Stop Making Sense, it’s hard to begrudge him the colorful saris, world music, interracial harmony and all.
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).
It's as if director Jonathan Demme traded in a plot for time-travel back to his 1984 concert film, Stop Making Sense.
As in Demme's recent Rachel Getting Married , momentum is itself a character in Stop Making Sense.
Rachel Getting Married, Demme's latest film, is like a digest for everything he has stood for as a filmmaker since 1974's women-in-prison classic Caged Heat.
That's not just a description of him politically (although it's hard to imagine another white director so interested in the problems of Haiti, or so at ease directing "Beloved").
Then you went all Steven Spielberg on us with “Beloved,” presumably drunk on the Oprah-fed Toni Morrison Kool-Aid.
Perhaps after squandering his Oscar and Indie cred on such slight efforts as Beloved, The Truth About Charlie, and The Manchurian Candidate (the last two unnecessary remakes), he decided to rediscover his cinematic muse.
Then you made “The Truth about Charlie,” the whole point of which was to make a case for Thandie Newton to be this generation’s Audrey Hepburn.
Perhaps after squandering his Oscar and Indie cred on such slight efforts as Beloved, The Truth About Charlie, and The Manchurian Candidate (the last two unnecessary remakes), he decided to rediscover his cinematic muse.
And while Demme's recent remakes of old spy thrillers (The Truth About Charlie, The Manchurian Candidate) have been muddled flops, that doesn't seem to trouble the director one bit—he just trains his ever-curious camera on what's next.
In Demme’s last personal fiction film, The Truth About Charlie (I’m not counting his Manchurian Candidate remake), the overflowing humanismmulticultural musicians everywhere you looked, and the camera made you lookoverwhelmed the narrative.
Moving down the line, when was the last time director Jonathan Demme (2002's " The Truth About Charlie ") has been this loose yet assured in his filmmaking craft?
Ironically, it's when he's resisted that urge that he's had his biggest hits -- the tautly focused "Silence of the Lambs," the conventionally plotted "Philadelphia."
You were willing to overlook reputed homophobe Denzel Washington talking Will Smith out of lip-locking a dude in “Six Degrees of Separation” to cast him in your gay/AIDS/Maria Callas opus, “Philadelphia.”
Director Jonathan Demme made two of the most significant Hollywood films in the early 1990s, The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia but recently he has been predominantly making documentaries.
Demme's career took a turn away from that sort of intimate, loose-jointed filmmaking with stiff exercises like "Silence of the Lambs" and "The Manchurian Candidate," and with oversize and overwrought projects like "Philadelphia."
Under the direction of Jonathan Demme, best known for his meticulous character studies in "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Philadelphia," "Rachel Getting Married" attempts to delve into the relationship between the two sisters and their seesaw battle for sanity and meaning.
Those who believe that Jonathan Demme went all soft with Philadelphia and never recovered may not be reassured by his latest movie, an ensemble tale of family pathology gussied up with vérité camera work, world music and improvising actors both trained and not.
(During that time, he made the documentaries Neil Young: Heart of Gold and Jimmy Carter Man from Plains.)
Jonathan Demme’s documentary passion projects like Neil Young: Heart of Gold and Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains helped him experiment with digital filmmaking and that technique is on full display in Rachel Getting Married.
An unintentional companion piece to last winter's "Margot at the Wedding," a similar tale of a "monster" sibling who disrupts her sister's nuptials, "Rachel Getting Married" establishes Hathaway as a bona fide adult movie star and a front-runner for next year's Best Actress Oscar while re-establishing Jonathan Demme as a top director of original material after a decade of remakes and documentaries ("The Manchurian Candidate," "Neil Young: Heart of Gold").
After a recent screening of Rachel Getting Married in Pleasantville, NY, Jonathan Demme confessed that, for several years following his remake of The Manchurian Candidate, he lost interest in fiction films.
Demme's career took a turn away from that sort of intimate, loose-jointed filmmaking with stiff exercises like "Silence of the Lambs" and "The Manchurian Candidate," and with oversize and overwrought projects like "Philadelphia."
Perhaps after squandering his Oscar and Indie cred on such slight efforts as Beloved, The Truth About Charlie, and The Manchurian Candidate (the last two unnecessary remakes), he decided to rediscover his cinematic muse.
"Interesting" certainly describes Rachel Getting Married , but it also sells it short; Demme's first narrative feature since 2004's remake of The Manchurian Candidate also happens to be a pretty damn fine bit of moviemaking, given its modest ambitions.
And while Demme's recent remakes of old spy thrillers (The Truth About Charlie, The Manchurian Candidate) have been muddled flops, that doesn't seem to trouble the director one bit—he just trains his ever-curious camera on what's next.
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.
Ever since the old Production Code was scrapped to allow last-minute mischief at the altar, as in Mike Nichols’ The Graduate (1967) and P. J. Hogan’s My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), it has been open season on brides and grooms and best men and maids of honor.
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").
Superficially, it's awfully suggestive of Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding from last year, although if you take away the wedding backdrop and the detail that the drama centers around two sisters, there's really nothing to connect the two films more than any random pair of movies about family dynamics.
Certainly, I enjoyed Rachel Getting Married a whole lot better than its evil twin in form and theme, Noah Baumbach’s grungy, mean-spirited, relentlessly cold Margot at the Wedding.
(You may even think you just saw it last year; Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding had a remarkably similar setup.)
In another recent nuptials film, Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding, nearly every encounter is engineered for us to cringe at the characters’ monstrous egotism.
Facile comparisons to Margot at the Wedding may inevitably follow Rachel Getting Married, yet unlike Noah Baumbach’s aggressively unpleasant portrait of sibling dysfunction, Jonathan Demme’s tale of a junkie who exits rehab to attend the wedding of her older sister is – despite a sometimes grating, troubled protagonist – big-hearted, generous and hopeful.
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At a meeting, she notes Kieran (Mather Zickel, "Diggers," "Balls of Fury"), who'll surprise us at that night's rehearsal dinner when he appears as Sidney's (Tunde Adebimpe, "Jump Tomorrow") best man.
You were willing to overlook reputed homophobe Denzel Washington talking Will Smith out of lip-locking a dude in “Six Degrees of Separation” to cast him in your gay/AIDS/Maria Callas opus, “Philadelphia.”