Rachel Getting Married
Directed by Jonathan Demme
Rachel Getting Married, which opened late last year in major cities, is receiving renewed attention because its star, Anne Hathaway, is up for an Oscar for best actress. She should be. In point of fact, she should win, and if any of her four rivals wins instead, the winner should just turn around and hand the Oscar to Hathaway, because no other female performance this year even approximates the rapier brilliance of her portrait of a junkie just out of a nine-month stint in rehab.
Hathaway has been a fascinating presence ever since she starred as a rebellious teenager in a superb but short-lived television series called Get Real in 1999. Charming and beautiful, she became a movie starlet in The Princess Diaries and a movie star in The Devil Wears Prada. Nothing in her limited body of work even came close to suggesting she had this in her.
There is so much going on in Hathaway’s performance that it’s hard to take it in at first. Her character, Kym, is whip-smart, garrulous, mean, bruised, narcissistic, guilt-riddled, deceitful, immature, loving, damaged, someone who has spent her life talking her way out of any corner and, failing that, falling back on her good looks to get by. Hathaway is so true to her role, and so accurate in all its details, that she conveys this all as though she were Kym and the movie we are watching is not a work of fiction at all but a documentary.
Kym is a great character, and all the credit for her is due its screenwriter, Jenny Lumet, whose only prior creative credits are as an occasional actress in her director-father Sidney’s films. It is a crime that Lumet’s screenplay for Rachel Getting Married did not receive an Oscar nomination because, with the exception of the Pixar movie Wall-E, none of the scripts in the category even deserves mention alongside this one.
Rachel Getting Married is entirely set during the weekend of the title character’s wedding. Rachel is Kym’s sister, and she is getting married in their childhood home. The depiction of the relationship between Rachel (played beautifully by another criminally overlooked veteran, Rosemarie DeWitt) is among the most shaded and interesting I can remember. There is an extraordinary scene in the early going when the seemingly loving and calm Rachel goes after her sister with a rhetorical hatchet following Kym’s problematic and self-obsessed toast at the rehearsal dinner.
“I thought my wedding weekend would be about me,” Rachel says, “but obviously even that isn’t possible.”
As they go at it–Kym pointing out that nobody knows how difficult rehab is, and Rachel pointing out that all their father’s attention was directed toward Kym–Rachel falls silent and reveals that she is a few months’ pregnant. Their father widens his eyes with joy. And Kym instinctively cries out, “That’s so unfair!”
This isn’t just remarkable screenwriting; it’s remarkable writing, period.
I wish I could report that the movie containing it and Hathaway’s performance are as good. But unfortunately, Rachel Getting Married has also been overcooked to a fare-thee-well by its incredibly ham-handed director, Jonathan Demme, who has chosen to ladle a sickly sweet multi-culti gravy over the proceedings.
Rachel and Kym are white; Rachel’s fiancé is black and a musician. Rachel’s father is white and a musician. Rachel’s father’s second wife is black, and I don’t know whether she’s a musician. Rachel’s mother is white and an artist. Everybody wears saris to the wedding, and the cake is in the shape of an Indian elephant. Men with sitars sit around throughout the movie playing annoying sitar music.
On the one hand, none of this is remarked upon. On the other hand, the movie treats its own portrait of cross-cultural and cross-color harmony–which stands in such marked contrast to the tensions within the core family–with a bizarre, self-referential, and reverential sentimentality that threatens to turn Rachel Getting Married into an unintentional joke.
There is so much smiling and beaming and back-slapping and haw-hawing and crying and sitar-strumming that it seems less like a wedding and more like an orthodontist convention. Demme foolishly means us to take all of it at face value, to revel in the wonder of it all, in a spirit entirely divorced from the complexity and sophistication with which Lumet has offered her stunning depiction of a family damaged beyond repair by the costs of Kym’s addictions–and the agonizing vitality of Hathaway’s etched-in-acid portrait of a deservedly unquiet soul.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
