Mark celebrates RACHEL GETTING MARRIED
Jonathan Demme has approached film from a variety of angles, the delirious crackpot, creepy fun of SOMETHING WILD and MARRIED TO THE MOB to well, the delirious crackpot, creepy fun of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. With his latest release though he tackles a relatively straightforward examination of family discord, family unity, and the way in which a single damaged strand within family and friends can cause cracks to appear over the entire surface. When Kym (Anne Hathaway) returns to the Buchman family home for the wedding of her sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt), she brings a along history of personal crisis, family conflict and tragedy along with her. The gathering subjected to her biting one-liners and compulsion for personal drama. And to ensure we get the full immersion experience Demme presents the entire journey from Kyms rehab home to wedding culmination in a loose, home movie style. All wavering hand-held angles, and those lingering close-ups that you make you feel like you should look away, stop staring. We even get real home video footage mixed in, just to make the rest of its professional digital camera work seem more real, and Demme, for the main part, manages to avoid making his shooting choice too much of an artifice (something Greengrass could perhaps have paid more attention to while shooting Bournes third outing) and which allows him to simply concentrate on the human, and physical, car crashes in front of the lens. The screenplay by Jenny Lumet (daughter of Sydney) plays its cards straight away as Kym and her drinking problems are picked up from rehab by her father (a nicely subtle, and constantly food providing Bill Irwin), and within moments the stresses of Kyms history come out, all prickly politeness and sarcasm. Its just the start of essentially the primary reason for watching, Anne Hathaways bald, vanity free and for all its tragic backstory, acerbically funny performance. Its admirable, and captivating, from a signature moment as Kym listens alone to the music downstairs to a quick stand-up tryst with the best man; even though sometimes its one of those where the audience feels like a 3rd wheel in a love affair between character and performer. Everyone else involved plays to the films environment, particularly De Witt as the marrying elder sibling, although Demmes penchant for mixing amateurs with the pros does throw up the odd flat note and that unfortunately includes the use of musician Tunde Adebimpe as Rachels intended, Sidney; he seems like a nice enough fellow but he inevitable gets lost in the central fractiousness. The shooting style can make it appear as though theyre playing to eachother, and to us (I mean do arguments like these happen in real life with such performance?), but as the family and guests roll in and out of the house and the confrontations we do get to perhaps the second reason for watching, Debra Winger as the missing matriarch. When she arrives, in the old family home, on screen, its as if weve missed her too. From the second she appears she manages, through a glance or a frosty gesture, to convey the sense of the familys deeper damage; the counterweight to Hathaways showier awards-friendly magnetism, and perhaps the unemotional lynchpin to all the problems. Music pervades the entire film, the wedding musicians and guests (including Robyn Hitchcock) providing the wandering soundtrack, and with the wedding itself and the usual hooplah the film-makers cant prevent the seemingly unavoidable American schmaltz, which does work to an extent with Sidneys song and cutesy ceremonial words, By the powers invested in me and Neil Young.., but for all its hand-held cinema verité its just as guilty of Hollywood unreality as any summer blockbuster. With all the surrounding strife, the supposedly homely style wedding is still a bohemian dream for us mere mortals in the audience. The kind that only happens in movies, even those about dysfunctional tragedy. Its not a perfect film and perhaps like an actual wedding video you sometimes wish for some judicious editing, but it is a great vehicle for the actors in it, and in the end thats a fair testimony to film-makers who at least tried to make something different, if not for us, then at least for themselves.