Rachel Getting Married: Anne Hathaway: Movies & TV
Rachel Getting Married: Anne Hathaway: Movies & TV
Amazon.com
Pitched between Robert Altman’s A Wedding and Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding–but more cautiously optimistic than both–Rachel Getting Married marks a change in course for director Jonathan Demme. Granted, few Oscar winners have walked a more diverse path. After a series of documentaries and remakes, the Silence of the Lambs helmer tries his hand at the intimate chamber drama. With the help of actress Anne Hathaway and screenwriter Jenny Lumet, daughter of filmmaker Sidney, he pulls it off. The festivities kick into high gear once Kym (Hathaway, with smeared eyeliner and unkempt hair) takes a break from rehab for her sister’s big day. It soon transpires that Kym, who hides her wounded soul behind a veil of sarcasm, serves as the Buchman’s resident black sheep. The problem goes deeper than drugs to a tragedy in which she played a part. As Kym, bride Rachel (Mad Men’s Rosemary DeWitt), their parents (Bill Irwin and Debra Winger), groom Sidney (TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe), and the rest of the bohemian Connecticut brood struggle with the past, the nuptials continue, graced by performances from past Demme collaborators like Sister Carol East (Something Wild) and Robyn Hitchcock (Storefront Hitchcock). The hours between reception and after-party contain humor, affection, and painful revelations. In the press notes, Demme claims that he and cinematographer Declan Quinn (In America) attempted to make a film that looked like “The most beautiful home movie ever made.” Using handheld cameras and believably flawed characters, they’ve done just that. –Kathleen C. Fennessy
Stills from Rachel Getting Married (Click for larger image)
Product Description
When Kym (Anne Hathaway - Golden Globe Nominee, Best Actress, Motion Picture (Drama)), returns to the Buchman family home for the wedding of her sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt), she brings a long history of personal crises, family conflict and tragedy along with her. The wedding couple’s abundant party of friends and relations have gathered for a joyful weekend of feasting, music and love, but Kym - with her biting one-liners and flair for bombshell drama - is a catalyst for long-simmering tensions in the family dynamic. Filled with the rich and eclectic characters that remain a hallmark of Jonathan Demme’s films, Rachel Getting Married paints a heartfelt, perceptive and sometimes hilarious family portrait.
Hathaway Excels in a Fierce Drama About Coming Home and Facing Demons,
By Ed Uyeshima (San Francisco, CA USA) -
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)
Sitting through a movie about sibling rivalry at a wedding, especially one starring the doe-eyed and normally facile Anne Hathaway, sounds like a potentially painful way to spend an evening. However, as directed by Jonathan Demme and written by Jenny Lumet (daughter of master filmmaker Sidney Lumet), this 2008 drama is not a lightweight star vehicle à la Julia Roberts circa 1997 but a darkly realistic look at the dysfunction within a family thrown into disarray. Using an almost cinéma vérité style, Demme explores how a wedding reopens old wounds within a family in a naturalistic way made all the more palpable by the emotional acuity in Lumet’s screenplay.
The focus is on Kym, a chain-smoking former model who has spent the last several months in rehab. As a substance abuser whose only armor is cutting sarcasm, she is absurdly hopeful that her sister Rachel’s wedding will be a harbinger for unconditional love from her upscale Connecticut family. Therein lies the problem as her narcissism provides the catalyst for long-simmering tensions that uncork during the preparations for a lavish, Indian-themed wedding weekend (the movie’s working title was “Dancing with Shiva”). It soon becomes clear that Kym’s link to a past tragedy is at the core of the unpredictable dynamics that force confrontations and regrettable actions among the four principal family members. Rachel appears to be Kym’s sensible opposite, but their alternately close and contentious relationship shows how they have not full recovered from past resentments. Their remarried father Paul is a bundle of loving support to the point of unctuous for both his girls, while their absentee mother Abby is the exact opposite - guarded and emotionally isolated until she is forced to face both her accountability and anger in one shocking moment.
Anne Hathaway is nothing short of a revelation as Kym. Instead of playing the role against the grain of her screen persona, she really shows what would happen if one of her previous characters - say, Andy Sachs in The Devil Wears Prada - went another route entirely. The actress’ studiousness and persistence are still very much in evidence, but the story allows her to use these traits under the guise of a self-destructive, often unlikable addict who gains attention through her outrageous self-absorption. As the put-upon title character, Rosemarie DeWitt realistically shows Rachel’s sense of pain and resentment as the attention veers to Kym during plans for the most important day of her life. Bill Irwin is winning as the unapologetically grateful Paul, but it’s really Debra Winger who steals her all-too-brief scenes by bringing the remote character of Abby to life. Now in her early fifties, the famously tempestuous actress seems to rein in her innate fieriness to play a woman who consciously disconnects herself from the family she raised. What remains is a crumbling façade of propriety masking this obvious gap. It’s similar to Mary Tyler Moore’s turn as the cold mother in Ordinary People, but casting the normally vibrant Winger (who probably would have played Kym a quarter century ago) is a masterstroke.
The film is not perfect. Demme’s home-video approach, while novel at first, proves wearing over the 114-minute running time. Pacing is also a problem, especially when the focus turns to the minutiae of the wedding ceremony and reception. I wish Demme could have cut this part of the film, so we could get to the icy, unfinished resolution sooner. As a filmmaker who obviously enjoys making music concert films (Stop Making Sense, Neil Young - Heart of Gold), there are quite a few musical performances presented in total. However, for non-aficionados, it may prove too much over time. While it’s refreshing to see interracial marriages treated so casually (Lumet’s grandmother is legend Lena Horne), Demme makes almost too big a point in presenting a global community though the diverse music and the wedding’s multi-cultural themes. The movie starts to feel like a Putumayo collection of third-world performances. Still, Demme’s intentions can’t be faulted, and neither can the piercing work of Hathaway and Winger.
Can You Go Home Again?,
By Laurel-Rain Snow - Raine- “Author of ‘Miles t… (Fresno, California) -
Still dealing with her emotional angst, Kym (Anne Hathaway) is sprung from rehab for the weekend, to attend the wedding of her sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt).
When she appears at the pre-nuptial events, Kym faces a host of demons - the least of which are memories of past drama and disappointments. As she wends her way through the emotional debris and faces the anger, hostility and sheer resentments of family members and friends, Kym discovers that forgiveness does not come easily.
Her reunion with her distant mother Abby (Debra Winger) reveals a layer of dysfunction only previously hinted at - and facing up to a long-ago tragedy suggests that forgiving oneself may be the biggest task of all.
Throughout the movie, we are privy to many layers of family connections, friendship bonds, and the power of love.
Anne Hathaway’s performance was stupendous - revealing a hidden depth only hinted at in previous films. Rachel Getting Married is a movie that I will watch over and over - that is how deeply moved I was by this film.
Laurel-Rain Snow
Author of: Web of Tyranny, etc.
Can this be a Jonathan Demme film?,
By Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) -
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)
RACHEL GETTING MARRIED proved to be an entry card for Anne Hathaway’s Oscar nomination, and while she turns in a strong performance, there is really very little else to recommend this film so unlike the work of Jonathan Demme. Written by Jenny Lumet, the story of a dysfunctional family on the weekend of the marriage of daughter Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) being upturned by the arrival of daughter Kym (Hathaway) on temporary leave from a rehab center and the clashes that occur from this planned happy event being replaced by the revelation of occult demons from the past is the nearly two hour noisy ennui that forms this film.
There are a few moments of interest (Kym’s AA meeting revelations, the tragedy that drove Kym’s mother - adroitly played by Debra Winger - away in divorce, and the clash between Rachel and Kym), but the bulk of this film is noisy partying that goes on forever and adds very little to the tension that should have been the focus of the film. For this viewer the performance (albeit brief) by Debra Winger is the reason to sit through this otherwise pretty boring film. One would expect the presence of the fine actress Anna Deavere Smith to heighten the action, but she is given little to do except fade into the woodwork. It is an interminable wedding celebration that only at the end finds a center. Grady Harp, March 09
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