Rachel Getting Married

There was an hour gap before my next movie at Waltham, and I took the opportunity to walk out in the dark cold evening to head for my now-favorite little hamburger joint by the railroad station, where I'd eaten last time. By now I felt somewhat like a regular. It's amazing how quickly you can make a place your own, even if it's only a small corner of it.

After wolfing down my hamburger I was back in the same theater, buying a ticket from the same guy at the counter, and heading back into the same auditorium to sit in exactly the same seat. Well, I wound up moving my seat because of some of the folks around me, but you can't have everything. Nothing happens the same way twice.

Also I cheated by sneaking my extra french fries into the auditorium, and eating them from the bag in my pocket. At some point in the future, I'll buy some popcorn there.

If the first film of my double-bill had been about the resilient buoyancy of the feminine spirit, this one would show the other extreme---a woman at the low ebb of life, trying to keep from sinking, and to claw her way back into anything resembling happiness.

There's been so much written about Rachel Getting Married, and I fear duplicating it all here. Basically I would probably agree with anything positive said about the movie.

As I settled down with clandestine french fries during the opening credits, I suddenly remembered, "Oh yeah. Jonathan Demme directed this," and from the opening shot, I felt in familiar cinematic territory regarding the heroine. Demme created one of the greatest heroines of cinema history---Jodie Foster as Agent Starling in The Silence of the Lambs (1991). Demme's opening shot of Lambs gives us the salient sketch of Starling, and her upcoming journey---she is alone on an obstacle course, sweating and panting heavily from dogged exertion, pulling herself up a mountain on a rope until she reaches the top.

Rachel opens with the same reveal-all character portrait of the protagonist. Anne Hathaway as Kym (Rachel is the protagonist's sister) is in a hospital rehab courtyard with a nurse and fellow patient. She is smoking---something wicked but allowed by the rules. She confronts the fellow patient over his own confiscated cigarette lighter, pointing out why he can't have it back because of his previous behavior. At the end of the scene, she is released out into the world.

We are inclined to feel sympathy for our protagonists, but the story does everything it can not only to challenge her, but to challenge us to keep liking her. At one moment, we are on her side. The next moment we are not so sure.

The story revolves around her visit home and her attendance at her sister's suburban Connecticut wedding. The first two-thirds of the movie is concerned mainly with the build-up to the ceremony, and the simultaneous inflation of the tension between Kym and her sister. At the same we are exposed to a mystery: who is Ethan, and what became of him?

Because the protagonist is just out of rehab, the essential story tension must therefore center on whether or not she will "relapse" in some fashion. Will the wedding come off as planned? Will Kym melt down and commit some horrible act of violence against herself or her family? Will she triumph over her challenges in the end? Will she rise or fall?

Just when I thought I had the movie figured out, with it's back-and-forth sympathies, it explodes in a critical highly-charged scene in which Kym asks an obvious question to one of her parents, one that would have gone clumsily unasked in a lesser movie. From that moment on, the ping-ponging of sympathies suddenly halts, and the story rockets forward with sudden laser clarity and alignment between the characters. We feel the momentum at our backs now, and we know whose side will be on for the rest of the movie, no matter how it turns out.

Demme, as I mentioned, is a master at evoking female performances that are about unearthing the repressed and violent truths in the human spirit. Rachel is all that and more. It's not really a wedding movie---for one thing the groom's family is somewhat downplayed, although the groom himself helps unwittingly drive the story in a critical scene involving a dishwasher competition. The fact that the groom's family is black gives them literal contrast when they otherwise might fade into the background of the story of Kym's family. It also contributes to a pan-racial cast of the movie that evokes a subtext about the dysfunction of the "American family" played out against the rest of the world of 2008.

If I were going to compare this any previous landmark movie, the one that leaps to mind is the much-overly-maligned Ordinary People (1980), which is similarly about the inevitable eruption of repressed suburban family dysfunction.

What an awesome film! As it stands right now, this has beaten out W for my favorite of the year.

But please don't let that keep you from seeing it, in case you find my enthusiasm off-putting. OK, do whatever the hell you want, dammit. See if I care!