Review of Rachel Getting Married (2008) by Tom B — 28 Mar 2010

I was hoping to see this when it came out with someone who I thought would like it, and we never got around to it and it's probably just as well. Everything works out, I guess. I felt great kinship with Anne Hathaway in this, along with much fondness.

At least for her character, but also for the soul Hathaway brings to light. The story is painfully reminiscent of The Celebration and Altman's A Wedding (which I've only partially seen). I find this easy to read a number of ways, most obviously as a genogram of what it means to be the outsider in a family, but of course by extension what it means to be the outsider in the larger family, the society at large, and how we shun those who cause trouble.

Another way to put it: we forgive those who die and the grief they cause, but not those who cause us grief while they live. Easier to die than interrupt a wedding speech with misplaced overwrought emotion.

If we have films eviscerating the hypocrisy of the American right, this might be one that eviscerates the feel-good hypocrisy of the American left. It's rather fatal-sounding, but the film seems to be fatalistically resigned to the idea that the majority of those who do not see will stay that way at all costs, even the cost of those they presumably love.

I was transfixed by the acting in this. The jittery camera did not bother me so much. The long spaces of observation allowed a feeling to breathe, the feeling of being among so many people and yet entirely isolated and overshadowed by the constant need to be happy-no-matter-what, but without allowing the emotions that don't fit.

That blockage, that turning away of the emotions that don't fit, that whole business of pasting a smile on no matter what, can definitely slice some people to bits, as long as they allow themselves to be exposed to it.

It's the friendly face of enlightened social exclusion the delivers the harshest blow. And now it seems like the modern descendant of Ordinary People, another film where the buried hatreds hide underneath the mannered surface of comfortable middle-class gentility in the hearts of those we turn to the most in our times of greatest need.

This one has a sharp eye.