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Rachel Getting Married

Jonathan Demme’s breakthrough film, 1977’s Handle with Care (you may have seen it under the title Citizen’s Band) ends, in the classical format of comedy, with a wedding that, like the wedding at the end of The 40 Year Old Virgin, serve as a celebration of how much we have come to know and like the characters we’ve just spent the evening with. One of the most humanistic of American filmmakers, Demme has never, to my recollection, made a film about people he didn’t seem to care about, or at least (in the case of villains like Something Wild’s Ray or Silence of the Lamb’s Hannibal Lecter) people he wanted to understand.

After a decade and a half in which his best films have been documentaries and concert films, Demme has made an entire film set at a wedding. I imagine that a lot of people will react to Rachel Getting Married by thinking, Gee, that’s a wedding I would like to have gone to. There is much eating, music, and dancing, most of it unusual or uncategorizable. In one scene the British musician Robyn Hitchcock (subject of a 1998 Demme film) performs with what appear to be members of a New Orleans band: They play a music that I don’t know to describe, though I would love to hear more of it. It’s to Demme’s credit that this variety intrigues us rather than makes us feel as if he’s showing off his eclectic tastes. He’s a little less successful at getting us to believe that the attendees at this Connecticut wedding, who seem to represent every conceivable racial and ethnic group, were not cast on precisely that basis. Demme lavishes so much loving attention to the details of this celebration that he often seems to have forgotten that there is a plot for him to deal with, centered on Anne Hathaway as the black sheep of the family, out from rehab to attend the marriage of her sister. In fact, the evidence of Rachel Getting Married seems to indicate that Demme only agreed to make this film (from a script by Jenny Lumet, daughter of Sidney) as an excuse to stage his ultimate fantasy wedding. Perhaps he felt that too much time spent on the dynamics of this family, who have suffered though divorce, the death of a child, and other traumas, would make them seem merely dysfunctional when what he really wanted to show was a celebration of healing. A wordless sequence in which the two sisters make peace on the morning of the wedding is so perfectly realized that it’s worth the implausibility of the scene that sets it up. Like many of his recent fictional films, Rachel Getting Married demonstrates some of Demme’s unique talents but not what used to be his greatest strength, the ability to wed his interests to a compelling and sustained narrative.

—m. faust



Trailer for Rachel Getting Married


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