Rating: 
As I had the good fortune to catch Jonathan Demme’s latest film, Rachel Getting Married, without knowing the slightest bit about it, this review shall tread lightly over the plot so that the full effect of its unraveling is felt as it was for me. All you need to know is that Anne Hathaway plays Kym, a recovering drug addict who has taken leave from her rehabilitation center to attend her sister’s wedding and confront the demons that await her there.
Demme appreciates the tacit dimension of the wedding ritual as something most of us have endured at some point either as participants or witnesses, and a lot can be conveyed just by the attempt at recording the mundane components of it. Long-winded speeches and the cutting of the cake become rituals tinged with a sense of alienating joy that is masterfully conveyed by lingering on them, and even when Kym is not onscreen we know that she is somewhere in the room, and she is feeling its divisive power. The ratcheted tension of the dress rehearsal speeches as Kym musters up the confidence to make her own toast is perhaps on par with anything in Funny Games as one of the most nerve-wracking moments I have experienced in the cinema this year.
Minimal by design, the film is handheld digital with plenty of jump cuts, using predominately one location, and coyly employing the situated music of the rehearsals and impromptu performances as a makeshift score (the groom, both in real life as a member of Tv on the Radio and in this story, is a musician by trade and his entourage of friends and family come packing instruments). As the music fills the cavernous halls of her childhood home, Kym darts around the house like a ghost surrounded by the celebrations of the living, her very presence opening unhealed wounds which are furtively captured in Demme’s camera. Back story is withheld and threaded out throughout the film giving every reaction to Kym an inflection of mystery. Demme plays off expectations throughout (the hair salon scene being a notable example) and by the time the family history had been completely exposed my allegiances to certain family members had shifted more than once.
Rachel Getting Married is unabashedly direct and confrontational with its drama, while at the same time periodically pulling back and making an observational study of the whole ceremony, with our protagonist in amongst the crowds as a piece of the scenery. I am sure this technique has been done before but for some reason in this context it felt revolutionary. Demme gives us the pageantry, the warmth of a loving reception, but also gives us its wrought underbelly, shows us the pins, the rehearsal of bliss, the sadness of those incapable of living up to familial ideals. Dysfunction here in a boldly liberal well-to-do family depicted without ridicule nor played for subtext, may rub some people the wrong way, may confuse others, but for me it defies categorization, in much the way its depiction of the prodigal daughter defies conventions. Kym’s story emerges and submerges throughout the course of the film, battling for attention onscreen with the interests of Rachel and her wedding (the title being a direct reference to this conflict) but Demme never lets the story be entirely about Kym, there is a dueling banjos nature to the storytelling that is fascinating to watch.
In this respect it differs from something like Margot at the Wedding, where despite both films being chiefly about dysfunctional sister relationships on the eve of one’s nuptials, Rachel Getting Married is far more ambitious with its storytelling, it does pathos unflinchingly and not just to be edgy, but it is also not afraid to immerse its protagonist’s voice into a wider world of observation, to not merely be subject but object, as in fact we all are, and in the process make Kym bereft of a complexity that the caricature of Margot lacked. To make a character who is a former drug addict more than a caricature is a feat in itself, and I will say it now because it is the elephant in the room: Anne Hathaway’s performance is a revelation, Kym is a revelation. Rather than the obvious jaded attendee of addict meetings and detractor of societal mores, Kym shows her vulnerability in doses; neither shrill nor a compilation of tics, she exists as a formidable sister/daughter that is trapped in her own bubble, close to love and reconciliation but only enough to feel the distance. It is at times agonizing to watch a family so incapable of connecting but it is also dead honest about the way habitual emotions can over time enslave us. This is the sort of lived-in family drama that usually takes seasons of HBO programming to get to, and here, in a matter of a couple of hours, such depths are tapped.
Rachel Getting Married is my favorite film of the year thus far by a fair margin, it is lodged in my mind and will not come out. I can see the Criterion Collection edition cover already: Kym’s vantage point from a bedroom window peering into the backyard, a wedding tent in assembly, a band in rehearsal, a black poodle ambling across the lawn, the fissures of all life’s plans out in the open for anyone with the patience to see.