Rachel Getting Married

Director Jonathan Demme has made a great, grainy, hand-held film. It’s about a Connecticut family, the Buchman’s, upper-middle class folks truly having a good ole time preparing for daughter Rachel’s wedding (Rosemarie DeWitt plays the title role). Patriarch Paul (Bill Irwin) and his second wife Carol (the estimable Anna Deavere Smith) are light on their feet, convivial, amused and amusing, very comfortable inside their own skin. Then frenetic, mordant daughter Kym (Ann Hathaway) shows up on a weekend pass from rehab and tries to push her sister out of the spotlight with increasingly bizarre, petulant, shameless and destructive theatrics. It’s pretty tough to watch at times, this sad, desperate, relentless competition with a more mature and accomplished sibling.

Like the Ice Storm, also set in Connecticut, the tension between the family members is linked to a terrible car accident. As Rachel unfolds we see how this event wounded them all emotionally, either muting or mutating the love they once shared. Kym’s homecoming (Rachel still lives there) rips the screws off the lid they’ve all put on their grief. Rachel and Kym’s biological mother (Debra Winger) also comes to the wedding and brings another dimension of fear-filled, tormented love into the mix. Stuff leaks out all over the place. Everyone except Kym tries their best to keep up the façade of normalcy. Ultimately, enough stuff is spewed, vented, shrieked and crashed so that the weight they all carry lifts ever so slightly. By the end, there’s the faintest glimmer of hope that at least some of them can start to move on.

Tough stuff, but pretty standard for the homecoming genre. Think about Celebration (1998), for example, with its revelations of the father’s sexual abuse of his young sons. Or Margot at the Wedding (2007), where the night before one of two sisters gets married the girls stay up late shredding every memory, exposing family secrets.

Demme’s film enriches the genre by adding real love stories to the angstfest. The film traipses over a lush carpeting of soulful music with a refreshing informality to unpack a sweet, almost gooey love between Rachel and her jazz musician husband, Sidney (Tunde Adebimpestory). I didn’t quite understand the whys and wherefores of their love but the newly weds manifested it abundantly and whole-heartedly. It was at least a plausible if unarticulated love, and certainly a welcome refuge from the film’s main course of people feeling unloved, confused, ashamed and mighty pissed off.

We are grateful to the director for his kindness and sense of narrative balance. Which is to say that the film definitely draws blood and spits bile but does not eat its children. In fact, it gives serious screen time to real affection, admiration, loyalty and creativity (as above). Ultimately, when the sturm und drang has finally subsided and the wedding is over, it’s the human kindness I remember most. And lucky are we who can take this feeling to our own homes and hearts.

The other surprise in this flick is the love story between the sisters Rachel and Kym.
There are several scenes that show how intimately they know each other and, despite some really rough patches, how much affection they share. I wish I felt that close to someone. I thought Kym’s acting out at the pre-wedding was at least partly motivated by jealousy for Sidney, an infantile rage at losing primacy in her sister’s heart, perhaps knowing she’d have to assume more responsibility for herself in future, a scary prospect.

All the actors mentioned above do a great job. Ann Hathaway gives a stunning performance as the triple threat Kym: drugged-out drama queen, bratty young sister (definitely single digits) and well-bred, well-read, vivacious young woman. She's a clear, bright star. Can't wait for her next film. Rosemarie DeWitt’s Rachel is also spectacular as the film's heroine and perhaps the only evolved individual in the mix. She is gracious and loving to Kym after the wild child has done everything in her power to ruin Rachel’s wedding day. Inspiring and profound.

Speaking of sibling rivalry -- Kym pushed a lot of my buttons, too. She reminded me of my little brother, Alan, who invariably weaseled himself into the middle of my circle of friends. He held forth until he’d charmed everyone with seemingly inexhaustible cuteness. Kym also evoked my middle brother Lee (I am the oldest). He was the kind of guy who once got into a brawl at my birthday party just as cake was being served and had to be taken to the hospital, leaving only blood stains and tearless vows of revenge behind.

Back in the day, ever the doting, surrogate parent, I forgave my brothers for grabbing attention and importance away from me. I had everything going for me; they needed it much more than I did. I realized late in the game that I had given away the farm without much benefit to myself. At some point I was saddened and hurt to realize that my love and what I took as sacrifice for my brothers had not been not perceived as such. The infrequent times we saw each other as 20 and 30 somethings seldom went more than an hour or two before some old wound was inadvertently tricked off and the more combustible aspects of ancient, still festering hurts and wrongs paraded onto the stage. It was awful stuff, painful and ridiculous, and I never found a satisfying way to either work through it or steer around it. At some point, I guess we all decided to just stop doing the dance.

I am not close with either of my brothers these days. I wish I knew how to fix whatever is broken but have concluded, sadly, that it is beyond my poor powers. I miss them and don’t miss them as people, but they are my brothers and we share things no one else does. That’s one of the basic strands of love’s DNA, even though it alone may not be enough to sustain a relationship. Or maybe it’s the wrong kind of common experience, too toxic, tainted. I console myself with the remote possibility of a quirky, funny, earnest and touching reconciliation a la David Lynch’s Straight Story. Maybe something will work out later on.