Review: Rachel Getting Married

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Call it “Another Wedding.” Jonathan Demme’s most successful fictional feature in many, many years, “Rachel Getting Married,” nods toward Robert Altman’s multilayered, cast-heavy ensemble enterprises with largely lovely results. The center around which all conflicts inevitably revolve is Anne Hathaway’s Kym, the freed-from-rehab older sister of Rachel. Sallow, sullen, with hair chopped in a severe pageboy, verbal, aggressive and passive-aggressive beyond belief but very near truth, you just want to hug the damage out of her. (Wrong choice.) Kym is a user, abuser, perceptively written, brilliantly performed. There are only a few false turns: gratifyingly, as the sputtery paterfamilias of the Buchman clan, Bill Irwin turns in the best performance I’ve ever seen him give; usually, he’s all parentheses, brackets and a loudly mimed susurrus of self-congratulatory smugness, which comes out here only in an unbearably long and aggravating scene where he and his future son-in-law compete in a crowded kitchen over who knows how best to fill a dishwasher. Jenny Lumet’s original script is rich with delicate strokes of human behavior, and the wealth of these privileged Connecticuters of no apparent profession is never questioned, nor is the lack of spoken racial commentary by the assembled. An obnoxious argument was begun this week by one online blogger who insisted that the film trafficked in some sort of racism by having the characters get along without commenting on difference; there are at least a half-dozen deft touches missed by this observer, who is likely too old at this point to go out and make his own movie full of manufactured conflict. A single instance that battles against this perception, as Rachel (Rosemarie Dewitt) is about to marry an African-American played with shy charm by TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe: Rachel and Kym’s mother is played by Debra Winger, a majestic and all-explaining presence in her few scenes, but their stepmother is played by Anna Deavere Smith. “Rachel Getting Married” is about contemporary haute bourgeois failings between generations, not the kind of vicious racism emerging in the last thirty days of the presidential campaign. Afterwards, a colleague wondered how much a wedding party of that extreme—Robyn Hitchcock is a wandering troubadour—might cost. How many million dollars was the movie budgeted for? That would be the precise, enormous figure. The final, sustained take under the closing credits is one of the simplest, most affecting portraits of uxorial desire I’ve ever seen in a movie. It holds grace. A cameo by the 82-year-old Roger Corman, as a wedding party guest kneeling behind a small video camera, will pass most viewers by, and tickle those who know he and Demme’s history. 113m. (Ray Pride)