Jonathan Demme’s first fiction film since his 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate (and only his second non-documentary in ten years), Rachel Getting Married is orchestrated like an extraordinarily intimate work of direct cinema. Working from a script by Jenny Lumet (daughter of Sidney), Demme shot the dysfunctional family drama on a combination of grainy, handheld 35mm and consumer video––without rehearsal, with a huge ensemble cast made up of actors and musicians, with a soundtrack consisting entirely of diegetic music performed either on or just off camera by the likes of Robyn Hitchcock, New Orleans jazz saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr, TV On The Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe (who also plays the key role of the man Rachel is getting married to) and sometime American Idol Tamyra Grey. For a film featuring not only said reality competition castoff but a tour de force performance from a two-time Teen Choice Award nominee, it’s almost unfathomably dark and emotionally tough. It’s essentially a Dogme 95 film directed by Robert Altman, which will be a frightening proposition for some, and something akin to cinematic ecstasy for others. It’s the latter for me.
Anne Hathaway plays Kym Buchanan, a career drug addict who takes leave from her latest stint in rehab to attend the wedding of her older sister Rachel (played Rosemarie DeWitt, who moves from her breakout role as Don Draper’s beatnik mistress on Mad Men to take on what seems like her righful place as a Maura Tierney/Catherine Keener type, a no-nonesense brunette destined to be counter-cast against ingenues). The wedding is set to take place at the Buchanan family’s sprawling Connecticut manse, which, to the externally prickly but internally fragile Kym’s dismay, has filled to bursting with assorted friends and family of the bride and groom, all with a different role to play in the weekend’s festivities under the watchful eye of the girls’ fastidiously caring father Paul (Bill Irwin) and his second wife Carol (Anna Deavere Smith). Kym drops into this swirl and instantly changes its chemistry with her acid tongue and total lack of filter. As she struggles to earn recognition and some modicum of trust and forgiveness from her weary sister, Kym forges a tenuous bond with best man Keiran (Mather Zickel)––who, like Kym, sneaks out daily to attend AA meetings––while also seeking out her mother (Debra Winger), who seems to be conspicuously distant; we soon learn that this is par for the course.
Hathaway is given the predictable cosmetic grit (homemade haircut, raccoon eyeliner, fingers constantly twitching for a smoke), but she turns Kym into something much more than a Hollywood cipher of addiction. She’s a bit of a girl who cried wolf: toxic though she can be, especially to those who are less than sympathetic to her struggles, Kym seems to be both serious about sobriety and deeply regretful regarding past, nearly unforgivable mistakes, but she’s made so many plays towards atonement in the past that anyone she’s hurt before is wary of getting fooled again. Hathaway’s vulnerability in this tricky role is stunning, but slyly so: as a viewer you can loathe her presence, as some of the personalities in the film speace seem to, and then with a single cut realize that she’s gone from a scene and not only miss her, but actually, actively worry about where she is and what she’s up to.
As the familial conflict builds to a violent breaking point and then becomes somewhat ameliorated by the boundless romance of the wedding and the wild joy of the all night dance party that follows (if nothing else, this is a fantastic example of the Endless Party movie), Kym’s frustration, sadness and sorrow uncomfortably and unignorably seeps in from the margins, like the smoke from her constant cigarette floating over from her solitary corner of the room. The most exciting thing about Rachel may be its refusal to permanently sort out the family’s life-long problems in the space of the film. Even as practical truces are formed and a tentative romance just barely begins to bloom, we get the sense that progress will be slow, leaving a damp-eyed Rachel to smoke alone in a corner at many supposedly fun functions in the future.
Despite the presence of star Hathaway, Rachel’s commerical prospects are probably slim, which makes it all the more puzzling that this film is having its North American prmiere here in Toronto this weekend and not last weekend in Telluride. Why this film was reportedly rejected by that exclusive festival is a mystery to me. Supremely artful in its formal riskiness and at least as emotionally raw and resonant as a good deal of the Cannes holdovers that did make the line-up, its omission in favor of forgettable domestic products like Flash of Genius and American Violets is inexplicable.
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