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| Movie Name: |
Rachel Getting Married |
| Grade: |
C |
| Date Posted: |
12/16/08 |
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“Rachael Needs to Get a New Director”
The cast of “Rachel Getting Married” brought their “A” Game to the set, but their director Jonathan Demme lets the drama deflate with erratic camerawork and editing that borders on sluggish. It’s guerilla filmmaking at its most portentous.
Kim (Anne Hathaway) has a furlough from rehab to attend her sister’s wedding. But as soon as she arrives, the former drug addict sucks the energy away from Bride Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) and her fiancée, turning it into “The Kim Show,” something that frustrates her sister immediately. All the family aggravations come to a head as everyone comes to terms with Kim’s issues.
Hathaway, always a thoughtful actress, finally sheds her squeaky clean Disney image that launched her to stardom in “The Princess Diaries” as an ego driven but vulnerable girl who can’t seem to do anything without causing a scene. Her toast at the rehearsal wedding, caustic and inappropriate, is stomach churning. Like witnessing a car accident that can’t be prevented, Audiences are bound to cringe but gawk.
Bill Irwin, who won a Tony award for his wickedly funny portrayal of George in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe,” gives a heartbreaking examination of addiction enabling. As Kim’s overly ingratiating, over-protective father, he shows how unconditional love can also be damning.
His polar opposite, Debra Winger, who has been absent on screen for decades to ironically devote to her family, plays a disconnected mother who has long shut down from the family she estranged years ago. Her moment of rage reminds viewers why she was one of the 80’s most enervating stars.
The strong ensemble, including DeWitt as the daughter sick of playing second fiddle on her own special day, Anna Devere Smith as Kim and Rachel’s understanding stepmother, and Mather Zickel as a former addict taking Kim under his wing, are all stellar. When the film focuses on them, it’s a painful but truthful tale. With so much honesty from the cast, it’s inconceivable why Demme, an award winning director, took the long way around to tell the story.
First, his camerawork frustrates. I assume the handheld work by the award-winning cinematographer Declan Quinn (“Leaving Las Vegas”) was meant to place the audience within the celebration, an anthropological case study of a family in crisis. Instead it feels like he tied the camera to the family dog and let him run free. There’s nothing fresh about shaky camerawork after years of “Blair Witch Project,” “Breaking The Waves” and even Woody Allen’s “Husbands and Wives.”
Worse is the editing. Demme, an esteemed documentarian of rock bands like Talking Heads, Neil Young and Robyn Hitchcock, appears more interested at times in the musical talents of the friends at the wedding than the main drama. The final 20 minutes focused mostly on people dancing at the reception when it should have worked on resolving the situations.
Demme should have trusted the inherent drama and able cast instead of punishing the audience with nausea-inducing mise-en-scene and scenes that belong on the Steinberg Bar Mitzvah video not a feature film. Grade: For the Cast: A-; For the Film: C
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| Posted by: bouynxdor |
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