Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

The title "Rachel Getting Married" should probably have given me more pause than it did. I find weddings — both in real life and in movies — boring. I have a very prototypical guy perspective that weddings are productions for the pleasure of the brides that grooms and the bride's parents indulge her in. Weddings these days are intensively documented so that the films of preparations, ceremonies, and parties can take even longer than the real time.

Jonathan Demme's title should have served as a warning flag for me, but I'd heard that the movie was less about Rachel than about her troubled sister Kym, played to an Oscar nomination by Anne Hathaway (Princess Diaries, The Devil Wears Pradas, Becoming Jane). This was true, but most of the movie felt like a not very good videotape record of the wedding rehearsal dinner (with endless toasts), the ceremony, and the wedding party.

The affluent white bride, Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt, the Bohemian artists of "Mad Men"), and the successful black groom Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio) are genial. Rachel feels, with apparently good reason, that Kym has always been the center of attentions with her various crises and drug-related dramas. Kym makes a sustained attempt to make the talking/toasting part of the wedding rehearsal about herself, annoying me perhaps even more than it annoys Rachel.

Hathatway has mostly played parts that it is easy for the audience to like and to empathize or empathize with. I find it impossible to like Kym, or to extend her much sympathy. I can admire Hathatway's deglamorized  acting abilities, but do not think her character deserves the compassion and constantly being the center of everyone's attention to which she feels entitled.

Even more annoying is the constantly panning, hand-held camera. The flow of images is all too like an amateur videotaping a wedding so that the couple can re-experience Their Special Moment and see that friends and family were doing, I've had to look at some still wedding pictures but have not been forced to sit through the hours of wedding documentation on film, fortunately! (Are guys, except the groom-survivor subjects to rewatching the event? Not those whom I've asked, and I've been spared any invitations to relive anyone's wedding on video> I liked some of the parts that would not be a part of that keepsake more, including the opening in the rehab center from which Kym checks out for the weekend of the wedding, and her confrontation with her mother (Debra Winger recognizable by her deep, gravelly voice). I think that Kym asks Mom a very good question, BTW.

I do not doubt that screenwriter Jenny Lumet and director Jonathan Demme intended to make audiences uncomfortable. They succeeded. But did we need to be made dizzy by the constant non-stedicam camera movement? Did we have to sit through so many wedding toasts (an unimaginative way to fill out characters who don't need to be filled out!)? Moreover, what is said on such occasions is very unreliable. The sibling tension and the load of guilt Kym loves to smear on the walls are what matters and are not advanced by the conventional speeches of other guests.

The DVD has two separate commentary tracks, neither including Demme or Hathaway. One has producer Neda Armian, editor Tim Squyres, and screenwriter Jenny Lumet;  the second just Rosmarie DeWitt (Rachel) speaking. There are also about 20 minutes of deleted scenes, undercutting my belief that the movie with its nausea-inducing camera movements are an uncut document of the proceedings (I exaggerate, but only a bit!). In a(n often hard-to-hear) Q&A at New York's Jacob Burns Center, Demme says he has lost interest in making fictional films, opening the way for me to comment that it shows! (I thought his documentary "The Agronomist" was very good, BTW.) There's also a trailer and a standard making-of ad, and one on the live music (which can be almost as annoying as the wobbling ever-panning camera).

For a sister coming home after a somewhat similar fatality, I much prefer the less screechy and less obtrusively filmed "I've Loved You So Long," which has the best performance by an actor of any of the 2009 moves I have yet seen: Kristen Scott-Thomas. And for a burden of guilt movie, I found "In the Bedroom" with Marisa Tomei more intresting than Kym's narcissistic self-pity.


©2009 Stephen O. Murray

Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age