Rachel Getting Married (2008) was directed by Jonathan Demme, who also directed Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, The Manchurian Candidate, as well as many many others. To be fair, I only saw the first two movies I just mentioned, but I enjoyed them immensely and would even go so far as to say that Silence of the Lambs is one of my favorite movies and the directing in it is part of my saying that. The directing in Rachel Getting Married is different, but it kept me watching. I would go so far as to say that it was very well directed, thanks to Mr. Demme. The film was the first written work (or at least the first listed on IMDB) by Jenny Lumet, and it kind of shows. The writing at the beginning perks my interest. Why can't that obviously strung out person not have his Zippo? I feel his pain, as my Zippo was stolen from me a number of years ago and I never got another one. So what the hell? Give the dude his Zippo. Then Anne Hathaway--who I will say now that I have been a fan of every since she broke free of the stigma of having her breakout role be the lead in The Princess Diaries--mentions that he's burned down a self-help library multiple times. Oh. Maybe you shouldn't give him his Zippo back.
So I assume, since I knew absolutely nothing of this movie before viewing, that Anne Hathaway was Rachel and that she was hence getting married. I was wrong. Anne played a girl named Kym, and why is there a Y in that name now? But anyway, she is getting out of rehab and for some reason she's not allowed to drive, but it may have something to do with what the Zippo dude said about her killing someone. Her father and assumed mother pick her up and pack her things and they leave. The drive home is also well directed, thanks to Jonathan Demme. The whole film looks as if it were shot with a really good hand-held digital camera and is shot in a way that almost makes it look like a 3rd person documentary, but the camera-holder is invisible and can leap across set pieces as easy as thinking. But now Anne is asking about her mom, which easily sets up that the woman in the car is now obviously her step-mother. Thats great. I've written scripts too, Jenny; it was a good job of introducing this fact.
For about the first--ooohhh--27 and a half minutes, I was really intrigued in the film. The directing was doing something so different that I was enjoying watching it and the writing was, well, not great but tolerable in most respects. Anne Hathaway was doing tremendously well, and Paul Irwin who played her father was also entertaining and doing a fine job acting. Introducing Rachel and Emma (who was a particular bitch) came and went and how the wedding is in two days and Kym wants to be the maid of honor, but NO she's a crazy bitch who does drugs, but Emma gives it up because she's a crazy bitch who wants the sisters to fight and blah blah blah. This is where it got to me.
This was the part of the film where things started getting a little emotional, and I'm not going to lie: I'm an emotional kind of guy. I get upset when I see people in pain. It's not a happy thing for me. But the directing of the film was doing something to me. It was making something I would normally find to be upsetting and a little overwhelming (because it is shot in such an oddly personal level) appear so removed that I couldn't be bothered to feel bad for anything I was seeing. The poor to mediocre writing was only amplifying how little I felt for the characters on screen.
About halfway through the film, there are several scenes where Anne Hathaway is nowhere to be found for around ten minutes. In most movies, this is fine and even expected. But the way it has been shot and the way that it been written were making her very personal with the camera. Almost every line was about her. What wasn't about her and was instead about the wedding, she is in the backround of the shot, looking all pouty. But now, she is beyond ear-shot, which hadn't happened, and she had little to no relevance to the conversation being had. This bothered me because I cared so little for Rachel getting married (the plot point, not the film itself) that I just wanted to see more of Kym and her recovering neurosis.
More of the writing that I did not like was the fact that Lumet actually stole a line from the old Winny The Pooh books and used it as a toast to the wedded couple from a thickly accented Jamaican guy. And she didn't credit it, which kind of makes me want to scream.
This is where my roommate interrupted and I was almost pleased that I could pause the movie for a second. It was getting kind of hard to take.
Kym needed to be the center of attention, which made her come off as a bitch. But pretty much the only thoroughly likable people in the film were the father, played wonderfully by Bill Irwin, and the groom, played by Tunde Adebimpe and right now I am really glad I'm not doing review videos because I would have no idea how to pronounce that. I mean, sure, Kym is a great character, but she is so unlikeable in some of the scenes that its hard to misunderstand why people might not want her around all the time.
And then something else strange happened. During the crazy climax where things come all out in the open, the odd disinterested feeling I had in all the characters and their feelings went away as if pushed off by a sexually frustrated secretary trying to seduce her boss. I got all emotional and I felt bad for not feeling for them earlier, but then I dismissed that because it was obviously the film's fault for not making me care any sooner. It moves at a damn glacier's pacing and the writing is so bland that I couldn't have been expected to feel anything earlier.
The soundtrack of the film was very natural, as all the music we hear in the audience they hear in the film, which again makes it seem very observer-ish. The music was interesting, at least, and fit well with the film and even the directing.
As a whole, Rachel Getting Married is probably not something I would have watched if I had not been suggested it as an idea for something to review. As a whole, it probably isn't something I will watch again, except on the off chance that someone I know reads this review and finds it interesting enough to ask me to watch it with them. Or if it will get me sex. It was a fair way to spend two hours, but I expected little to nothing from the actual film. The film has won over a dozen awards (over half of which went to Anne Hathaway for best actress), and was nominated for many many more so it apparently did something right. How Jenny Lumet won best screenplay and Jonathan Demme got NOTHING for directing, I will never know.
-Evan "Dez" O'Connor
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