Review of Rachel Getting Married (2008) by Lewis P — 03 Apr 2010

Winner of the Sofia Coppola Award for Creative Film-making.

*** This review may contain spoilers ***.

'Rachel Getting Married' is the story of Kym (played by Anne Hathaway), a dysfunctional ex-addict who returns home for her sister's wedding after receiving a weekend furlough from a rehab facility. The film is shot in the hand-held style of a 'you-are-there' documentary. Quite a bit of the dialog seems as if it was improvised.

The story unfolds slowly. We're introduced to Kym just as she returns home as the wedding preparations are under way. She's an emotional wreck, needy, angry and sometimes paranoid. She acts impulsively (immediately having sex with the groom's best man). Rachel has a 'tough love' attitude toward her sister and expects her to curtail her acting out behavior especially during the wedding festivities. Their father however is guilt-ridden over Kym's troubled past and can best be described as an 'enabler'; he argues with Rachel as he feels she's too hard on her sister. In a very long, drawn out scene, various guests toast the expectant bride and groom and Kym 'apologizes' for her past bad behavior to her sister; the speech comes off as nasty and self-indulgent which alienates Rachel's guests. The night before the wedding, Rachel and Kym's long-divorced mother (played by Debra Winger) shows up and she gets into an argument with Kym where they end up slapping each other. During this argument, a dark family secret is revealed: while high on drugs, Kym had a car accident years before resulting in the death of their 10 year old brother.

Kym has her 'dark moment of the soul' after arguing with her mother. She gets in the family car and drives it into a wooded area and deliberately crashes it into a tree. The deployment of an air bag saves her from serious injury. She's escorted back to the house by the police where she pulls herself together enough to attend the actual wedding (since the bride and groom are an interracial couple, the merriment, including quite a bit of dancing and singing, has a decided multicultural flavor).

The day after the wedding, the mother leaves and bids Rachel a fond farewell. However, her goodbyes to Kym are much cooler and restrained. Kym's counselor picks her up to bring her back to the rehab facility where she will continue with her treatment.

The film's screenwriter, Jenny Lumet (yes you guessed it, daughter of director Sidney Lumet) tries so hard to make the principal characters sympathetic but ends up depicting them as neurotic and unlikeable. Lumet creates the cardinal sin of screen writing when her main character doesn't change throughout the story. Kym remains insufferably narcissistic and self-pitying. Either have your main character change for the better (e.g. Dorothy learning the lesson of 'home sweet home' in the Wizard of Oz) or tragically get worse and fail to learn the lesson he needs to (e.g. Al Pacino's 'shattered globe' at the end of 'Scarface', symbol of the illusory world he wished to conquer). Other neurotic one-note characters include the aforementioned father (the 'enabler'), the unforgiving mother, horny best man and petulant bridesmaid.

Rachel appears to be the most well-rounded of the characters in the film who has a strong enough ego to actually like herself. Sidney, the fiancé and subsequent groom, is nothing more than a smiling cipher. The rest of the guests are unknown entities, as the screenwriter chose not to develop them as multi-dimensional characters. The family members do a lot of toasting of one another but we never find out anything about them of any substance whatsoever.

To confess, I never thought of Jonathan Demme as one of the great directors of our era. And certainly this vanity project proves that he is not. And certainly Jenny Lumet is following in the footsteps of Sofia Coppola, a no-talent who has only succeeded in the movie business due to nepotism.

In the end, 'Rachel Getting Married' emulates the Robert Altman style of film-making?that's where you create neurotic (or in some cases unlikeable) straw men, shoot them down and then claim you're a great artist because you had the insight to see through the phony characters you created.