Rachel Getting Married

People have walked out of this film. That's how authentic it feels. After playing a princess in "The Princess Diaries," another rich gal in "Brokeback Mountain," and a modern day Cinderella to Meryl Streep in "The Devil Wears Prada," Anne Hathaway finally gets to show her stuff. It isn't pretty. It isn't kind. It's very messy, but it's human and frail. And she does it well, so well that I longed for her to be back on screen so that I could see inside her soul once again.

Rachel Getting Married isn't just about a dysfunctional family at a wedding. Like funerals, weddings bring out the worst in us. It might just be too many members of the same gene pool gathered together. (According to The New York Times today, some scientists believe that genes fight with each other, causing all sorts of mental disorders.) It might be too much alcohol or too many expectations that somehow at a momentous event like a wedding, no one will really be themselves, but suddenly transformed into normal. No, weddings and funerals make us bigger, make us more of us.

So when Kym, played by Anne Hathaway, leaves a rehab center to come home to her sister's wedding, we know things aren't going to go well. While waiting for her father Paul, played by Bill Irwin, my favorite clown and mime from the Pickle Family Circus, Kym sits with her counselor and another patient, and we feel her anxiety, her terror of leaving her prison coccoon and entering her family's.

I have a sister. We disappoint each other as friends. We are too dissimilar, our experience growing up with the same two parents was totally different. Our memories are contradictory, too. In Rachel Getting Married, Kym and Rachel are sisters. Rachel, played by a Rosemarie DeWitt, wants her wedding to be hers, to be in her creation. She wants to be the center of attention for once. After all, she is the normal one. As the film progresses, we learn that this family shattered years back, leaving Kym as a drug addict in and out of recovery, Rachel trying to understand by getting a Ph.D. in psychology, Paul the father as the desperate nurturer, and the mother, played by Debra Winger, as the distant one who ran away from her own family and her memories.

For those of you who love Anna Deavere Smith, Paul's second wife, and Debra Winger, the distant mother, you will be disappointed, because their roles don't give them a real chance to establish themselves. This is a film about families at a wedding, so most of the roles, except for Kym, Rachel, and Paul, the father, although delicate and perfectly nuanced, are small and fleeting. The rehearsal dinner, the afternoon of the wedding, and the wedding itself are fine as porcelain, but not formal or elegant. The texture of reality and fantasy that Jonathan Demme has brought to the story makes it so real, yet tinged with that dreamy quality that we want to be a part of a wedding, especially a happy wedding. The film is as moving as "Philadelphia," his film about an HIV afflicted attorney, (Tom Hanks won an Oscar for best actor), but without the slickness. This is true independent film in tone and quality. Jenny Lumet wrote the screenplay.

Did I mention that the bride is white and the groom is African American? In this Obama election year, the racial diversity adds to the flavor of the film although only the white family is developed. The way these families meet for the first time, the stories told at the rehearsal dinner that embarrass and expose the bride and groom are little poems about intimacy. There is even a scene at a twelve step meeting. Having just accompanied a friend to my first Al-Anon meeting, believe me, there is something so true about the scene when Kym first arrives home and has to pee in a cup, entering the meeting late and clumsily.

So, if you come from a really nuts family that has a secret, don't go to Rachel Getting Married. Otherwise, it is fresh, intricate, disturbing, fragile, and unresolved. There isn't a voyeuristic quality to the film either, just a glimpse into our own humanity.