Review: Rachel Getting Married
Friday 17 May 2013 - Filed under film
Rachel Getting Married (2008)
Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie Dewitt, Bill Irwin, Debra Winger. Directed by Jonathan Demme.
For many scenes in Rachel Getting Married, director Jonathan Demme didn’t work with cinematographer Declan Quinn to plan any of the camera shots. Quinn was instructed to let the action dictate where the cameras pointed while the actors were doing their scenes. Similarly, many of the scenes were never blocked or rehearsed, and the actors were encouraged to work off of each other. The result is a wonderfuly non-Hollywood-looking movie whose dialogue (often improvised) and staging seem amazing in their intimacy and believability. There are whispered arguments in dark rooms, and characters who follow each other through hallways clogged with other characters, and musicians playing on porches who are told to shut up by characters in adjacent kitchens, and it (mostly) all works to make one heck of a character study.
Anne Hathaway is Kym, a twenty-something woman who leaves drug rehab for a few days to attend the wedding of her sister Rachel (Rosemarie Dewitt). The family house is crammed with people in the way that houses often are in those few days leading up to a wedding. There are guests from out of town, maids of honor all over the place, caterers, decorators, wedding planners, musicians, and old friends, all moving frantically about while Rachel, Kym, and their parents put on their best faces for this big event.
Kym’s got problems, and it’s not hard to tell that Rachel has had problems of her own. The whole family is dealing with something terrible, too, and although this family is pretty vocal in its affections, the grieving never seems to have been shared, each member dealing with it completely alone, even when they are all in the same room.
There are scenes where the emotions are so raw that you feel like an intruder, and those improvised camera angles heighten the effect. Similarly, there are scenes of great awkwardness that leave the viewer begging to be set free from the discomfort. I have said for a long time that one of the most dangerous things in the world is an open mike at a wedding reception, and there is a moment at a rehearsal dinner when Kym takes the mike and illustrates it perfectly.
As a study of these sisters and their relationship, this is a heck of a movie, Dewitt and Hathaway turning in some amazing performances. I have a few problems with Demme’s insistence on setting a scene and holding it there; the rehearsal dinner seems to take forever, and there is a wedding reception scene that seems far, far, far too long, giving us little more than characters in different combinations dancing to different kinds of music. Demme took advantage of his characters’ ties to music and placed musicians all over the place, so that what sounds like soundtrack music is often actually ambient music played by friends of the groom all over the premises and throughout the film. He also gave the musicians instructions to improvise according to what what happening around them, something that seems like a cool idea but which I found tiresome.
I will add that there are some musical scenes that seem to exist only because Demme likes the musicians. For instance, Robyn Hitchcock (or a character played by Robyn Hitchcock; it’s impossible to tell which) plays at the wedding, the cameras lingering on him as if Demme is saying, “Look who I got in my movie!” Tiresome.
These failings aside, Rachel Getting Married is a good showcase of Hathaway’s and Dewitt’s acting chops, the kind of thing that says here are two actors who really know their stuff, if you didn’t know it already.
8/10
85/100
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Sharon Solarz (Susan Sarandon) is ready to turn herself in. She’s wanted by the FBI for her part in a Weather Underground bank robbery thirty years ago and for the murder of one of the bank’s security guards. When police pick her up, a local reporter named Ben Shepard (Shia Labeouf) does some follow-up, and is soon on the trail of Solarz’s accomplices, one of whom seems to be Jim Grant (Robert Redford), a local attorney known for defending social-consciousness-type cases. Grant feels the noose tightening, so he takes off, leaving a young daughter with his brother and heading across the country to hook up with other former Weather Underground members who might know the whereabouts of the woman who can provide his alibi.
It’s something of a chase movie, with Grant staying one step ahead of the law and Shepard trying to stay one step ahead of him. There is a little bit of moralizing, especially toward the end, where characters ask themselves whether they were right to use violence to further their 1960s-conflicted cause. Redford tries to play up the media angle, too, using his character almost to dare Shephard to exercise some journalistic scruples rather than go for the big story and mess up a few innocent people’s lives even while exposing some senior citizens who did crazy things in their youth.
There is much more of that kind of thing between Redford and Julie Christie, who plays that former partner in crime he’s in pursuit of. Not only has she not mellowed in her convictions, but she continues to defy the government by smuggling what appears to be marijuana by boat. If there was collateral damage in the Underground’s efforts to stop the war, it is nothing compared to the collateral damage done by the government in waging that war. Grant insists things aren’t so simple, and he points to one victim they both know who has been affected by their activities even though she doesn’t know the first thing about them.
I wouldn’t have believed that Colin Firth and Emily Blunt could make a bad movie together, but Arthur Newman is pretty bad. It starts off promisingly, with Firth as a divorcee named Wallace Avery. Unhappy with his job and estranged from his son, he tells everyone he’s going on a solo camping trip for the weekend and fakes his own death. He’s got a plan to make his old self disappear and to reappear as Arthur Newman, a golf pro at a private club in another state.
It’s all downhill from there. Firth and Blunt put forth a decent effort, but the journey one way seems leisurely and fun while the journey back is sudden and unconvincing. Whatever it is that sets Arthur and Mike on their bizarre path is never dealt with in satisfying enough a manner to justify what they do next. I can’t even tell if the ending is supposed to be happy or not, or even what other choices the characters are supposed to have had.
There is a scene in Cold Weather where Doug and Gail (Chris Lankenau and Trieste Kelly Dunn) are sitting on the floor in Gail’s apartment. Gail is drinking whiskey from a tumbler. Chris is assembling a coffee table from Ikea. In the director’s commentary on the DVD of this film, Aaron Katz mentions that there was supposed to be some exposition in this scene. I think it was supposed to be something about why Doug has moved back to Portland after leaving school in Chicago. Katz cut that stuff out. He left in a short exchange between the brother and sister about whether or not the amount left in the glass dictates her swallowing it all in one shot or if there’s enough to make it two sips.
This mystery is not told like any you’ve seen. When Doug discovers what he figures must be some kind of code, he asks his sister to drive him to the library so he can check out some books on codebreaking. We follow Doug and Gail into the library, to the shelves with the codebreaking books, to the circulation desk to check the books out, and to the apartment to watch them read the books, and then the books don’t even seem to do teach them anything useful. So Doug figures he needs something else, and we follow him as he pursues that, and even that doesn’t take him any closer to solving the mystery. And somewhere in there is a moderate-speed car chase involving only one car.
It’s easy to get annoyed with Matthew McConaughey. All that running around shirtless and a few bad films can make you forget how good he was in some of his early movies, such as Contact and A Time to Kill. I didn’t see last year’s Magic Mike or Killer Joe, for which he got a lot of positive attention, but I did recently see him in Bernie and would have loved his performance if he didn’t stick out like a movie star among a bunch of regular people.
McConaughey plays Mud, a fugitive from the law, hiding on an island in a river delta in Arkansas. Two teenaged boys named Ellis and Neckbone (Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland) befriend him, at first agreeing to bring him food and then to take letters to the woman he’s loved since high school. At the same time, all the usual fifteen-year-old stuff is going on in Ellis’s life, and Mud becomes something of a emblem for him. Ellis sees in Mud something of a romantic ideal when it seems that all around him are the cynical realities.
I have written before about how Reese Witherspoon seems to play every role as if she’s in an Oscar-winning movie, and for the first time in a while, the material seems to keep up with her in this film. This is not her movie, but she inhabits the part of it that’s hers like it’s her last shot to show what she can do. She is beautiful and tragic and kind of elegant even with bruises on her face and a cigarette in her mouth. This is one of my favorite performances from her.
We all know about Stella Liebeck, the woman who burned herself with McDonald’s coffee, sued the restaurant chain for medical bills, and walked away with nearly three million dollars to cover expenses and to punish McDonald’s. Hot Coffee asks people on the street what they remember about the case, and then presents the facts: a judge reduced the jury’s total to just $640,000; McDonald’s had received multiple complaints that people were burning themselves on its coffee; the jury’s punitive amount was equal to about two days’ worth of revenue collected by McDonald’s for coffee alone; and the injuries suffered by Liebeck were horrifying. Given everything to consider, do people think the original jury reward was excessive? The people on the street say no.
It’s heavy-handed, to be sure, but unless the facts offered by director Susan Saladoff are inaccurate, there is a lot here I was unaware of. Caps on damages used to seem reasonable to me, but when a hospital employs a doctor with a known history of misdiagnosing patients, and when that doctor makes a stupid mistake and a child is deprived of oxygen in its mother’s womb and suffers horrible brain damage, does a few hundred thousand dollars sound like a fair compensation for the family who will have to pay for care and surgeries for the rest of this child’s life? And if a corporation has its employees sign binding arbitration agreements, what does a woman do when she is raped by coworkers and the arbiters rule in favor of the corporation? Should it be legal for someone to have to waive due process without that person possibly knowing what might happen to her?
About Cherry would like you to believe that its main character is an empowered woman who, while being introduced to nude modeling by a boyfriend with less-than-noble intentions, embraces it on her own terms without blaming her messed-up family life or her worrying about what her loved ones think. She very quickly drops the boyfriend, flees to San Francisco with her best (guy) friend in tow, hooks up with a lawyer, and begins a career in porn. Anyone questioning her chosen lifestyle is dropped, but alienation from people who don’t accept her decisions is the only consequence the film wants to consider, while its own evidence indicates that there’s more to explore.
Part of you wants to root for her. She seems to have found a working situation that pays well, that she has no moral qualms about, and that provides a respectful, friendly workplace where everyone loves and understands her. This isn’t like those other operations, where the women get taken advantage. When her boyfriend, a cokehead lawyer, asks her what she thinks she’s doing with her life, she drops him, and we feel it’s a good move because, well, because that lawyer is played by James Franco.
But the movie seems to want it both ways (not a double entendre, I swear), driving Angelina and her best friend to a confrontation that seems inevitable but possibly liberating. That it culminates with one of the most baffling responses to “I love you” I have ever heard hints at an attempt to say something meaningful about pornography, about the women who star in it, and about the men who watch it, but the statement doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, and when it’s all over, it feels like the end of those sad MTV videos, where the girl is her own girl now, but has also accepted a life that’s not quite what she set out for.
I’m sure I’ve seen several films set against the space race of the 1950s and 1960s, but Cosmonauta is almost surely the only I’ve seen where the Russians are the good guys. In this Italian film, Miriana Raschilla plays Luciana, a teenaged girl whose membership in the Communist Party in her Italian town causes tension in her family. Her father had been a party leader, but now that he has died, Luciana’s mother has married a conservative, don’t-stir-the-pot kind of businessman. Her brother longs to journey to space some day, but his epilepsy makes that just a dream, and his occasional seizures also cause Luciana some stress.
She is as serious as any focused teenager on her passionate ideals, but the other teenagers in her party don’t take her seriously, despite the respect they all have for her deceased father. They shoot down her ideas but applaud when one of the boys repeats them. If not for one of the women in the grown-up part of the party, and if not for the hormones coursing through the young men’s veins, she would receive no attention at all in her party’s meeting house.
Jomar is a (likely) alcoholic ski-lift attendant in Norway, apparently a former ski athlete who has come on hard times in this Norwegian-language film. He spends most of the early part of the film in his upstairs bedroom, even demanding that one customer come upstairs with a pot of snow (so he can melt it on his stovetop) if he wants to get his lift ticket. When a friend drops by unannounced, they immediately get into a fistfight and then share a meal. The visitor says that Jomar is the father of a young child, in a town he names that is far north.
When the credits rolled on Nord, the others in attendance let out a collective, puzzled sound. I stuck around for a few minutes to eavesdrop on the discussions, but they were mostly of the “I guess it’s just a fun, light, slice-of-life kind of movie,” but while it kind of works on that level, my fellow moviegoers seemed to ignore a definite progression in the encounters Jord has with the people he meets. Not merely a simple tale of a guy moving north, it is almost certainly a journey of another kind, and if the conclusion leaves some unsatisfied, it left me feeling pretty good about our main character’s prospects. 
Oblivion, the new Tom Cruise sci-fi film, is another of those films that’s better the less you know about it before you go in. For this reason, my summary is going to sound thin. There is more to it than I am going to let you in on, perhaps much more. I’m not exactly sure because some of it was explained so quickly or subtly that I don’t know exactly what happened even after reading the too-detailed synopsis on Wikipedia.
Some stuff happens to some drones. Harper goes to investigate. Things get weird.
This is a beautiful movie to look at. Many scenes in the first half of the film seem to linger, to move a bit slowly, seemingly in order to let the viewer soak up the beautifully composed scenery. I almost never do this, but since I was in the back row and nobody was behind me, I took my phone out and snapped a few photos. There were a few things I wanted to remember about the way it looked, and I was happy to have shelled out a few extra bucks to see this on my local theater’s very-large screen.