I Love You This Much: A Review of ‘Rachel Getting Married’

Explain Yourself: Try as she might, Anne Hathaway's Kym cannot get away from the mistakes of her past.

On my way into the screening of Rachel Getting Married I was informed by the woman tearing my ticket that it was not a romantic comedy. Warned, perhaps, rather than informed, as though the first Anne Hathaway bridal comedy I was hankering after had been all booked up, and this was the second, more dangerous choice. Not to cast aspersions on Gary Winick (whose work on Ugly Betty has been exemplary, I am sure), but when forced to choose between his Bride Wars and the latest Jonathan Demme, which in a way I was, I will always choose the latter, taking the risk of another The Truth About Charlie if I must.

Hathaway here plays Kym, a damaged, self-involved young woman who has just been released from rehab (again?) in time to attend the wedding of her older sister, which is being extensively prepared for and rehearsed. Tightly wound and pale-skinned, Kym moves through her childhood home like a ghost, before stumbling to and from a narcotics anonymous meeting; she is an instantly likeable but at the same time callous and scathing character. Not for her the sharp put-down barbs that we have been trained to expect from the jaded teen-grown-up.

The film seems to be positioning itself as a comedy of humiliation in the same vein as some of the more cringe-worth episodes of The Office as Kym desperately draws attention away from her pre-nuptial sister and towards her own neuroses with the repeated excuse that it is part of the ‘healing process’. Entertaining as this might be, it is something we have seen before, as is the suggestion of a redemptive romance with the best man. When Kym stands up during the rehearsal dinner to make an impromptu speech the room around her tangibly recoils with embarrassment. However, she does not make a comic foil of herself, but rather only a nuisance, and the scene continues. In tandem with Kym, and with a sensitive touch, the film begins to shed its self-destructive and unenlightening narcissism. A later moment involving the competitive filling of a dishwasher, in which Kym dissolves into the crowd around her and is happy to remain a spectator rather than a participant is quietly moving, although the scene turns on a small revelation that comes indirectly from Kym herself and which – the more we learn of the family and recent history – implies some kind of cosmic moral punishment of Kym, who, as we have seen, does a perfectly good job of punishing herself.

The script is by first-time Jenny Lumet, daughter of the world-famous Sydney, and it shows the same intensified, guilt-ridden family dynamics of her father’s recent Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, only shorn of the cumbersome criminality and temporal editing games. Both her and director Demme are smart enough to play the story straight, the latter’s experience with concert films perhaps contributing to his confidence and lightness of touch in filming an actuality without intruding upon it. (Even the title seems to purposefully toy with the grammar of reality: ‘what did you do yesterday?’, ‘I saw Rachel getting married’, ‘who’s Rachel?’) He is, of course, assisted by his actors – Hathaway has justifiably drawn praise, but credit is due to Rosemarie DeWitt’s Rachel, and the chemistry that the two share. Bill Irwin’s paterfamilias Paul is perhaps the most surprising interpretation of a role on display, his flighty attempt at fortitude becoming more compelling as the film goes on.

While occasionally heavy-going, the film is never heavy-handed, and seems rosy-cheeked during the moments it is put in the position of being as dramatic as the people depicted, preferring the momentous commitment of marriage between two people. The most striking aspect of Rachel Getting Married may be the way it conjures up the spine-tingling mixture of momentousness and pure joy which attends the union of two people very much in love. Depending on your mood, Rachel and her fiancé Sidney’s success, feeling quiet even in the face of all the fuss and bluster created around it, creates either hope for all the Kym’s of this world, or pushes them into oblivion because of its incredible unassailability.