Jonathan Demme (2008)
What’s good about Rachel Getting Married – and there’s plenty – is so good that, while it’s happening, I completely forgot the bad, which is not in short supply either. It’s great to see Jonathan Demme back doing things that he can do almost peerlessly. He made some wonderful comedies in the 1970s and 1980s – Handle with Care (aka Citizens’ Band), Melvin and Howard, Something Wild (comedies is probably too limiting a description), as well as Stop Making Sense, an excellent film of a Talking Heads concert. In 1991 Demme had a huge hit and won an Oscar for The Silence of the Lambs. He did an expert job on what didn’t, however, feel like a Jonathan Demme picture. The same was true, to a lesser extent, of Philadelphia in 1993, although it confirmed his reputation as a fine director of actors and an accomplished storyteller. In recent years, his most noticed work has been the screen adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (which I’ve not seen) and a poor, seemingly pointless remake of The Manchurian Candidate. Although the Connecticut family of the bride in Rachel Getting Married is more educated and affluent than most of the people (with the signal exception of Howard Hughes) in the earlier Demme films I’m fond of, he seems very comfortable with a return to character-driven, observational territory. It takes a little while to get your bearings. The hand-held camera skitters around the Buchman family home. It’s an effective way of suggesting the disorientation of Kym, who’s come out of rehab for her elder sister Rachel’s wedding, but it contributed to the difficulty I had, in the early scenes, of picking up some of what the characters were saying. But once you get to grips with the rapid visual and conversational rhythms – the filming is intimate in a way that makes you feel an eavesdropper at first – Demme’s assurance and fluidity are very pleasurable.
The film starts on the eve-of-the-eve of Rachel’s wedding and ends the morning after the ceremony. It’s about the relationships within Rachel’s dysfunctional family – as the bride herself describes it, in the words she speaks to her groom at the ceremony. The screenplay by Jenny Lumet (Sidney Lumet’s daughter) has some really good ideas and dialogue, which often sounds improvised thanks to the freely naturalistic style of the acting that Demme orchestrates so well. The main problem is that he and Lumet struggle to move the story forward except by forcing in a clunky, unconvincing twist or detail. Because the sequences in between are so easily rhythmical, the moments when these ten-ton weights are dropped stop the film in its tracks. (As Sally said, it then takes a little while each time for it to recover.) Lumet overwrites Kym’s backstory in a way that fundamentally unbalances the script. It’s not clear how long Kym, who looks to be in her early twenties, has been in rehab but a more imaginative (or confident) writer might have tried to make her loose-cannon egocentricity a sufficient basis for mining family tensions at the wedding. For the first 40 minutes or so, it kept occurring to me that the film needed to be just a bit and funnier than it was. Then Kym informs her 12-steps-program group that, as a 16-year old, babysitting her little brother Ethan but out of her head on drink and drugs, she had a car crash in which Ethan died. (There’s been a hint, but no more, in the very first scene – when Kym’s waiting to leave the rehab centre – that her addiction problems have caused a road accident at some point in the past.) She can’t forgive herself and she tells the 12-steps group that she wouldn’t want to believe in a God who could forgive her.
From this point onwards, the possibility of lightening up the film goes out of the window – but the revelation doesn’t lead to any deepening of Kym’s character either. It turns Rachel Getting Married into a more conventional piece than the fresh, vibrant style of the film suggests. Ethan’s death is used as the explanation of the Buchman family’s relationships in much the same way as the sibling drowning is used in Ordinary People, a relatively straight and humourless drama of psychotherapy. The only difference – and a welcome one – is that Kym doesn’t then have another single experience that resolves and expels the problems of the past. Her return to the rehab centre at the end of the film is accompanied by a sense that being there may be an easier option than life with her family outside (rather in the way that the Alessandro Nivola character in Junebug discovers that the stress of a high-pressure job in Chicago can’t compete with the stress of a few days’ return to his folks in North Carolina).
Two passages in the film exemplify most strikingly its strengths and weaknesses. On the evening of the day that Kym arrives home, there’s a wedding ‘rehearsal dinner’. Numerous family members and friends of Rachel and Sidney, the groom-to-be, give short speeches. These are well written – realistic, amusing and always characterising the speaker – and Demme handles the occasion marvellously: it’s a fine example of using a quasi-documentary visual technique to dramatic effect, so that we pick up more and more – from their glances and body language and casual remarks – about the relationships between the people in the room. When Kym gets up to speak, an apprehensive hush descends like a pall on the proceedings and shades into anxiety as she yatters on – about herself rather than Rachel. As they begin to get a sense that the end of the speech is in sight, the other diners start to relax and to laugh – mainly with relief that it could have been worse and is nearly over. Kym’s contribution is a relatively theatrical but still dramatically satisfying climax to the speeches that have gone before.
Demme then cuts to an after-dinner family row with Rachel complaining about Kym’s self-centredness, as reflected in her speech. This heavy underlines what we’ve already picked up and rings much less true than anything in the rehearsal dinner sequence. I wasn’t convinced that the determinedly collected Rachel’s patience would snap so early and generate an outburst that jeopardised the fragile affability she’s desperate to preserve over the weekend of the wedding. I was especially unconvinced that she would use this occasion to come out with accusations that Kym has always been their father Paul’s favourite. Lumet and Demme redeem the situation – at a comic level anyway – by then having Rachel use the tactic of announcing she’s pregnant and Kym dismayed that the news upstages her and she can’t top it. But I think the scene exemplifies Lumet’s tendency to resort to a big emotional confrontation when she’s not sure how to move things on. mAfter lunch the following day, Sidney – in a rare moment of controversiality – initiates a contest with Paul as to who’s quicker at loading the dishwasher. This is a splendid, original illustration of the confusion of humour and cut-throat competition in social family sparring. Kym, eager to join in and support her father, passes over some more crockery to add to the load. The plate on the top of the pile is a brightly-coloured child’s plate on which Ethan had written his name. This not only brings the fun to an abrupt halt; the obviousness and falseness of what Kym does – you can’t believe this precious plate would be kept with others on the shelf, let alone that she doesn’t notice it – kills the scene.
Jenny Lumet introduces many elements which, though instantly effective, are not followed through in the characters’ relationships. I was left with the sense that Demme should have been tougher on Lumet (and either made some more cuts or asked for rewrites). Sally may have been right to suggest there are repeated signs that bits of business or dialogue Demme and Lumet were fond of have been kept in – even if a convincing place can’t be found for them. When Kym first arrives home, she and Rachel lie on Rachel’s bed laughing together – and noticeably excluding Rachel’s sneeringly prissy friend Emma – about one of the wedding guests, and the story this woman always trots out about when she was an Olympic figure-skating judge. I loved the detail of this shared recollection but nothing else in the film suggests that kind of easy intimacy between the sisters. Rachel gives in to Kym’s complaint that she, not Emma, should be the maid of honour; but the outraged Emma never raises the issue again. I liked the way that Emma and Rachel looked like sisters (in a way that Kym and Rachel didn’t) but the implication that they’re two of a kind is never developed – indeed there’s nothing to explain their friendship or make it convincing. (Emma is, unusually in a Demme film, a character with no redeeming features whatsoever.) It’s not clear why Kym has to attend 12-step group seminars on the day she arrives and the next (or, if daily attendance is an essential part of her treatment, why her family hasn’t made better arrangements to enable her to go to these). At the first of these sessions, Kym sees a man who, in the next scene, is revealed to be Sidney’s best man, Kieran; in the scene after that one, Kym and Kieran have sex. In spite of the fact that Kieran had travelled from Hawaii for the wedding, I was (just about) willing to believe he might have dropped in at the 12-steps meeting (if the idea is that addicts – or even former addicts – should go to the nearest one available, wherever they happen to be). It’s incredible, however, that Kieran – who’s thereafter shown as decent, sensitive and admiringly loyal to Sidney – would get it on with Kym, or be seduced by her, in this way. (In the unlikely event that Sidney and Rachel hadn’t briefed him about her, his seeing Kym at the addicts’ meeting would have caused the conscientious Kieran to handle with care.) Kym then doesn’t seem to react to (or deliberately avoid) Kieran for the rest of the film, until the moment of their goodbyes.
In spite of his denials, we can see in the early scenes that the girls’ father does seem to be protective of Kym in a way that Rachel could resent; yet, after Kym has gone AWOL the night before the wedding and arrives back at the house shortly before the ceremony, Paul isn’t shown as looking anxiously to see that she’s keeping herself together – or where she is when she disappears from the main party later in the evening. Things are wrong from the point at which we learn that the missing Kym has gone to see her mother, Abby, right up to the point at which the ceremony gets underway. Kym asks Abby why she was allowed – in view of her drink and drugs dependence even then – to babysit Ethan; this exchange is written and played as if Kym had never asked the question before. Having exchanged punches with her mother, Kym drives off and has a car crash, which Demme films too spectacularly. When Kym arrives back home, there’s no suggestion that Emma is raring to go back to her maid of honour role; Rachel calmly, lovingly bathes Kym and does her make-up to conceal her black eye from the car accident. The film recovers its balance during the exchange of vows and testimonies from Rachel and Sidney as to why they love each other. These are skilfully written and spoken but, even so, they remind you of the shortcomings elsewhere in the script. We can certainly believe that Rachel would love the benign, centred, physically commanding Sidney because he’s a refuge from the frazzling tensions of her family; but in fact there’s been no suggestion that the security of his love has had any effect on Rachel’s nerves. (If it had, that of course would seriously reduce the opportunities for Rachel and Kym to yell home truths at each other.) Why Sidney is so attracted to Rachel remains unclear; he finds this brittle woman utterly delightful and has no reaction to her angry outbursts. I was uncomfortable with the fact that the black or mixed race characters – Sidney’s whole family, the rehab clinic worker, Paul’s new partner – were generally presented as amiably uncomplicated; because this applied to very few of the whites, it was hard not to see it as an ethnic characteristic.
I’ve criticised the film – largely the screenplay – in this kind of detail because of my frustration that Rachel Getting Married isn’t better than it is; because, in many ways, it seems real in a way that films rarely do (so that what’s unreal sticks out more); and because some of the flaws I’m complaining about could have been at least mitigated through fairly minor adjustment. Examples: when Kym confronts her mother, Abby could have said, ‘We’ve had this conversation a hundred times – not again, please’; Emma, not Rachel, could have tended Kym’s minor car-crash injuries (in a businesslike way, given the proximity of the ceremony, but also in a way that expressed something decent in Emma); Sidney could have been initially shocked by Rachel’s anger but have accepted this as nothing more than pre-wedding nerves (and, in doing so, showed himself to be not only a source of comfort but also a man who preferred to believe a comfortable fiction).
One or two people walked out of the Filmhouse before the end. Bride Wars is showing at the Odeon and the thought occurred to me that some people had seen Anne Hathaway in that and decided that the matrimonial title of the Demme film offered more of the same, and were disappointed to find otherwise. Probably not the case but this does reflect the dichotomy between the types of role Hathaway has played so far – although the innocuous (The Princess Diaries, Becoming Jane, etc) has had the upper hand. Even in a decent comedy like The Devil Wears Prada, Hathaway had the bland role. She was good in Brokeback Mountain – although a little uncertain compared with the other young actresses in the picture. Rachel Getting Married is her first leading dramatic role. That her performance is, to that extent, a revelation carries a risk of its being overpraised and there were a few moments when I felt the actress, as much as the character, was eager to be the centre of attention. But Anne Hathaway is very good. Her vocal rhythms suggest someone whose natural way of expressing herself is through self-satisfied, acid putdowns but whose life has gone in a direction that’s left her tentative about doing this out loud any more – Hathaway makes you believe that Kym is so used to living a conversation inside her head that she’s sometimes not sure whether she’s talking to other people or to herself. It’s an inventive way of suggesting isolation and Kym’s difficulties in the world outside the clinic. The fine line between Kym’s looking desolate (a) in order to remind people how unhappy she is and (b) in genuine recognition that she can never atone is really distressing. I wish Jenny Lumet had supplied Hathaway with more moments when she could be funny but she does well with what opportunities she has (like the moment in the hairdresser’s when she’s reminded by a man who remembers her from rehab of the extravagantly untruthful biography she gave herself there). Demme often shoots her in profile; with her hair pulled back and her pale face and large dark eyes (even before the shiner from the crash), Hathaway – strangely for someone who’s usually been cast for her conventional prettiness – sometimes reminded me of Liza Minnelli in her occasional waif-like moments in Cabaret.
The casting of the film is very acute and the acting throughout (and in the smallest parts) is excellent. It seems that, like Rachel, the Buchman parents have been drawn, since their divorce, to unexciting, quietly supportive partners (played by Anna Deveare Smith and Jerome LePage). It’s a delight to see Debra Winger again, as Abby; she matches up physically with Rachel – and Winger is such an emotionally fine-tuned performer that she (brilliantly) suggests temperamental affinities with both daughters. Rosemarie Dewitt isn’t afraid to show the disagreeable side of Rachel (a kind of censorious petulance). I grew to like this actress more as the film progressed: she suggests more aspects to the character than the script evidently supplies, including a developing inheritance from her mother of the ability, through personal and social graciousness, to dissemble and subdue emotional sharp edges. As the father, Bill Irwin (who looks a slightly disconcerting cross between Tony Blair and someone I can’t identify) is extremely good at expressing the tensions that underlie Paul Buchman’s clenched jollity and very touching in moments such as when he tries and fails to conceal Paul’s hurt feelings that Rachel has already told her mother about the pregnancy. Considering how carelessly conceived his role seems to be, Mather Zickel does a fine job as Kieran; he convincingly suggests an emotional alertness and an experience of keeping himself – and his feelings – in the background. Tunde Adebimpe is all that the part of Sidney requires but that’s not much when the part is so underwritten. The same goes for Anisa George as Emma.
The inter-ethnic marriage of Rachel and Sidney is reflected in various aspects of the wedding production. These range from the fairly ridiculous (like the sari-style dresses of Rachel and her attendants) to the chaotically enjoyable – such as the culturally diverse collection of musicians and music involved in the proceedings. The use of the music is witty: it’s a din that drives a character whose nerves are already shredded even further towards the edge; it’s also raucously celebratory. There’s a wonderful, extended sequence near the end of the film where the music functions in the latter mode and, over the closing credits, Rachel sits, the morning after her wedding, looking out over the lawn and listening to the tune played by a kind of modern folk group. (The moment allows the audience, as well as Rachel, to reflect on what’s happened in the course of the film.) You sense in all this Jonathan Demme’s own love of, and eclectic tastes in, music – and a correspondence between this aspect of Demme and his way of looking at people. He doesn’t sentimentalise them or avoid showing human unhappiness. He hardly ever dismisses a character cheaply or unkindly (that’s why Emma remains a nagging exception here). He’s enthused by complication, eccentricity and individuality and he can capture these qualities in a way that draws you in – and which makes you feel you’re partaking of his world, and sharing the painful delights of it. It would be pushing it to say that Rachel Getting Married is a great piece of direction – it’s just too messy for that – but the best bits of Demme’s work here are unbeatable.
24 January 2009
