Demme Gets Intimate With 'Rachel'

by Brett Parker

To watch Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married is to actively participate in one of the most colorful and interesting weddings you’ve ever seen. Some movies are so gritty and realistic, they can be called slices of life. If it wasn’t for the silver screen standing between us, we could literally be sitting at a table at Rachel’s wedding: listening to the speeches, observing the family drama, helping around the house, and watching some wonderful musical performances. Demme has crafted a film that allows us to feel exactly what it would be like to be a guest at a specific wedding, and we’re very glad we were invited!

As the film opens, we meet Kym (Anne Hathaway), a recovering drug addict who sits eagerly on a bench in front of her rehabilitation center. She has been given a weekend pass to attend the wedding of her older sister, Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt). After being picked up by her father, Paul (Bill Irwin), Kym, as well as the audience, gets whisked away to one of the most unconventional, open-minded, loving, dramatic, creative, and wouldn’t you know it, musical of all weddings. The guest list contains family members of different races, the ceremony is basked in Indian culture, and musicians roam around playing wonderful music. Rachel’s fiancé, Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe) is a musician and the wedding is surrounded by his musician friends who play all sorts of enjoyable sets for the guests. Like Once, this is a film surrounded with talented musicians who see their craft as a supreme form of expression and a language that’s more expressive than English. The music helps to express the positive atmosphere of love and celebration.

Yet not everything is bright and cheery at the wedding. The frantic and self-centered Kym harbors overwhelming guilt and pain over a horrible tragedy that affected the entire family. Deep down, Kym wants some kind of closure on things, and this causes tension with Rachel, who just wants to enjoy her wedding, and Kym’s birth mother, Abby (Debra Winger), who turns out to be the most resentful and least forgiving towards Kym’s tragic mistake.

Fans of indie movies can probably guess the film’s true path right from the opening scenes. On paper, Rachel Getting Married would appear to be your typical wedding drama, with all the family bonds, ceremonial formalities, and emotional revelations. Yet Jonathan Demme and his gifted cinematographer Declan Quinn (Leaving Las Vegas, Pride and Glory) have elevated the script by exploring a most unconventional wedding with a remarkable vividness and bohemian spirit. This movie is filled with inventive and refreshing moments that would appear risky and absurd in a lesser movie with a lesser filmmaker, yet here we are astonished at how easily we buy it.

The example I’m thinking of is the ceremony scene in which Rachel and Sidney exchange their own vows with each other. I’ve always found it ridiculous when men serenade women with their singing voice. Unless you’re Elvis Presley or Frank Sinatra, do these men honestly expect their voice alone to move a girl? Give me a break! So when Sidney begins singing a Neil Young song (of all damn things!) to express his love to Rachel in front of all the wedding guests, I began to get nervous. Yet as the singing went on, I truly felt the sincerity of it and it worked wonderfully within the musical context the film has established. Adebimpe is fully convincing in his efforts and the guests react the exact way we expect them to. In a more polished and shallow Hollywood effort, a moment like this could come across as manipulative and cringe-inducing. Not this time: Demme has let us into a world so intimate and real that we believe this character would really do sing at this exact moment and really mean it.

It’s rare to see a film where every member of the cast hits on all cylinders and are perfect in their performances. Rachel Getting Married is one of those films. I was going to use this space to single out the performances I thought we’re great, until I realized everyone in this movie is perfect and engaging. Demme and his Casting Directors, Tiffany Little Canfield and Bernard Telsey, have filled the screen with distinctive and engaging people who all embody their roles wonderfully and convince us that these are real people at a real wedding. Of course the performance everyone is talking about is Anne Hathaway’s performance as Kym. Playing a frantic, recovering addict can be risky for any actress, considering the grand opportunity to act over the top. Indeed, there are times when Kym isn’t necessarily likeable. Her vicious and selfish tendencies can be rather off-putting at times (especially during a speech she gives at the rehearsal dinner). Yet the radiant and beautiful Hathaway embodies Kym’s gritty spirit with the confidence and fearlessness of a great actress. It’s a testament to her that Kym goes from making us cringe to making us want to hug her. Does Hathaway deserve Oscar-worthy praise here? You bet!

In terms of content, it’s easy to recognize this as a Jonathan Demme picture. Demme has always been a director who focuses on the peculiarities of human behavior within recognizable Hollywood plotlines and we can easily spot how he puts his character finesse on a standard wedding plot. His attention to unlikely relationships, his affection for unique music, and his eye for unexpected human depths can easily be spotted here. Yet visually, the film bears little resemblance to the distinct visual style Demme has fashioned over his career. This time out, both Demme and Quinn favor that true indie style of using digital shaky cam techniques to give the audience the feeling of what it would be like to be standing and sitting right next to these characters. It has that quick and intimate low-budget indie feel, and it works. This is a style we’d expect from some young, art house director and not an Oscar winning Hollywood auteur. Indeed, Demme is a modern auteur whose garnered Hawksian praise for the unique visual style he brings to all of his films. Part of me wonders if this film would work just as well if Demme applied his usual slick and engaging Hollywood tactics as opposed to this quick, naturalistic style we’ve seen countless times before. I think it could and I’d be very interested to see that, but perhaps I’m wrong. Demme’s style works wonderfully, for he has appropriately and effectively found a way to shed the distancing that comes with specific Hollywood techniques and engage us on an intimate level, plucking us right into the middle of this wedding.

It was hard for me to watch this film without thinking of Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach’s downer of an indie drama that also focused on a troubled woman attending the unique wedding of her sister. Both films had a naturalistic visual scheme and concerned themselves with the tensions and bonds of a dysfunctional family as they try and carry out an unconventional wedding. Both films favored a penetrating rawness in obtaining emotional truths not easily seen at a Friday-night multiplex. So here are two films that look extremely similar yet give the audience extremely different vibes. How come Margot at the Wedding felt like a complete waste of time while Rachel Getting Married is a true pleasure? It’s the fact that Demme does a better job of highlighting how families interact and treat each other during a wedding and he sets out to create a cinematic wedding that’s never been seen before. Baumbach’s film is cold and manic-depressive, something that, cinematically speaking, seems too easy to pull off in these times. I admire Demme for crafting a truly joyous and heart-warming wedding atmosphere, which is all the more admirable considering how he still brings all the appropriate weight to the more harrowing and tragic aspects of the story. Basically, Margot at the Wedding didn’t display a strong enough reason for its own existence while we can sense that Demme made Rachel Getting Married to express the fascinating ways a wedding can evoke creative forms of celebration and deep family revelations.

Of course Rachel Getting Married is only entertaining up to a point, since wedding moves in themselves are only entertaining up to a point. Dramatic and fascinating things can be expressed at a wedding, yet to me, the formalities of a wedding can limit stories in escalating towards great fiction. For being at a wedding isn’t exactly the most supreme form of entertainment, is it? Nonetheless, Rachel Getting Married has set a new standard for how pictures of this kind should be done. It plays traditional notes of the genre to absolute perfection while exuding fresh, creative flourishes we never really thought could work so convincingly. I never really got worked up over a wedding film before, yet if future films in the genre have even half the colorful touch of Demme’s film, I’ll be awaiting them in eager anticipation.