Rachel Getting Married Review

 
By Colin Sedwick-Dunlap

Anne Hathaway might be the single most under-rated actress working today.

I will admit that she has had a bad luck streak recently when it comes to her films. Not that she was ever bad, just that she never got a chance to really grab hold of a leading role and make her presence one that resonates even after spending minutes off screen.

“Rachel Getting Married” is her break-out film. It might be presumptuous, but I feel safe saying she gives the performance of the decade in this role.

Hathaway plays Kym, a young, pale, heroin-chic-eyed former drug addict, fresh out of rehab to attend her sister’s wedding in Connecticut. Kym is funny, sarcastic, and abrasive, and we get the feeling early on that we might be in for a “Juno” rip-off except with adults.

When she sees her sister, Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt), for the first time in her wedding dress, her immediate response is “Rachel, you are so thin! I seriously, like, I would swear to God you were puking again.”

She acts similarly apprehensive around Rachel’s prudish best friend, Emma (Anisa George), her deservingly despised mother, Abby (Debra Winger), and her concerned, slightly overbearing father, Paul (Bill Irwin. Yes, the clown).

Kym begins as the quintessential black sheep of a well-to-do, rich, liberal Connecticut family, but after a painfully awkward, trite, and inappropriate congratulation speech for her sister at the wedding rehearsal dinner, we realize that she’s not as impenetrably quick-witted as we had originally thought.

This is where Hathaway’s brilliance comes in. She knows exactly when to pull back, despite playing a person who thrives on attention and sympathy. She’s not like Ellen Page in “Juno,” constantly reciting obviously pre-written witty comments, although she might like to be. Kym is a true-to-life attention whore. She doesn’t care whether or not people like her or hate her, as long as everyone’s looking.

Enough has been said about Hathaway’s performance. Like the wedding itself, the movie is not all about her. One major point of interest in this film is that it was directed by Jonathan Demme, a man who is most famous for Oscar-winning epics such as Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia. Here, he creates an independent film that doesn’t feel gimmicky or like a mainstream movie in disguise.

A big reason for this is the shaky, hand-held cinematography by Declan Quinn, which manages to transcend a cliché, tired gimmick used in many movies as a cheap method of immersion. Here, the film is shot like a voyeuristic documentary, and edited in a way that puts us in Kym’s shoes during the rehearsal and celebration scenes as we see chaotic clips of speeches by family and friends that we (and she) don’t know, constantly wanting the focus to go back on her.

Also impressive is the surprisingly subtle way the film handles the aspect of the marriage being inter-racial. A bad writer or director might throw in plodding, exhausting, painful scenes of family members expressing passive, condescending racist disapproval of their white daughter marrying a black man or vice versa, but here both families are respectful and accepting, and the issue is never once raised.

One more thing worth mentioning is that Rachel’s fiancée, Sydney, is played by “TV On the Radio” lead singer Tunde Adebimpe, who has a shameless and great singing moment towards the end of the film. As a fan of the band, this was a pleasant surprise.

“Rachel Getting Married” ties with “The Wrestler” as my number 1 movie of the year, and I would encourage anyone reading this to find a theater near them that’s playing it. I give it an A+.