'Rachel Getting Married' - The Surprise Feel-Bad Movie of the Year!

Posted on October 3, 2008 - 12:11am by michael The rehabilitation drama is a genre that I have the hardest time relating to and enjoying, not only because I have so little experience with the whole rehabilitation thing myself, but also because the better done they are, the worse they make you feel. It was one of the last of the 2008 Oscar nominees that I managed to see, and I'm thankful that I didn't assume that the word "Married" in the title automatically qualifies it as a date movie. I imagine there are going to be high school kids and college kids all over the world foolishly bringing a girl on a date to see this movie, only to leave the theater in a state of deep depression.

The movie is about a young girl named Kym who is returning from 9-months of drug rehab (which she has been in and out of for more than half of her life) to attend the celebration of her older sister's wedding. She brings with her all of the emotional baggage and more that you would expect from someone with a long history of drug abuse and mental instability, and the movie creates an incredibly realistic crisi-riddled family struggling to come together peacefully and enjoy one of the most important days in one of their lives.

Rachel does get married and the entire movie revolves around the wedding, but the movie is not about marriage or weddings at all, it's about Kym and her rehabilitation (or lack thereof) from a dangerous life of drug abuse. Look at the poster at the top of this review and you'll get a general idea about the ration of Kym to the wedding that we see in the movie. It's not even about the fact that Rachel is marrying a man of a different race. The movie shows the combination of two very different families, but it has nothing to do with any problems that might arise from that. In fact, there are none. Rachel loves this man, Sidney, and he loves her back, and that's all we really need to know about the wedding element. The only way that the cast of the wedding becomes involved with the workings of the rest of the movie are in the ways that they attempt to deal with Kym and help Kym's family to deal with her.

Anne Hathaway embodies the character of Kym so completely and so thoroughly that it's almost impossible to think that she doesn't have some personal experience that allows her to portray this kind of character so well, but I doubt that's true. When I watch her performance it reminds me of some similar kinds of people that I knew in high school and hung out with for a while, before I realized that such people are best to be avoided. She is an emotional train wreck and it's nearly impossible to imagine her forming a healthy relatinoship with anyone.

The movie is shot in an interesting style. Most of it feels like a traditional wedding film, at least as far as the photography, but a lot of it is filmed with a hand-held, and decidedly unsteady, camera, which gives it that feeling of a homemade family film rather than a fictional movie. Director Jonathan Demme understands that we have all spent a good amount of time watching shaky wedding videos, and that this method of filming will tap into that experience and make the movie all the more realistic to us.

The camera also spends some time wandering around the wedding party, showing us the people that are there rather than introducing us to a few key characters and leaving everyone else as strangers or extras. Everyone has a role in the wedding, and that is their role in the film, and what could be simpler and better than that?

I'm a little puzzled, however, about one particular scene. It is revealed about midway through the film that Kym suffered a catastrophic family tragedy some years earlier which comes to an emotional peak at one point, and ultimately Kym takes off in the family Mercedes, which she crashed into a huge rock and then spends the night in the wrecked car. When she is discovered by joggers the next morning, the car is towed away and the police give her a ride back home and she walks back into the house, and not a word is ever said about the whole episode, even though earlier her father said he wasn't comfortable with her driving alone.

I mentioned before that this is not my kind of movie. I enjoy downer movies that are done well, but something about drug rehab is just too real and too gritty for my tastes, particularly because I have a huge family myself and I understand the impact that one person's addictions can cause everyone else, and I don't really enjoy imagining that. I have one cousin that was almost a brother to me for most of our lives but he's been in and out of prison for the last ten years and that's really bad enough. But even though the movie is not my style, I can appreciate the amazing level of realism that they have created with such a large cast putting on such a large event as Rachel's wedding.

Anne Hathaway definitely deserves her Oscar nomination even though she won't win, and I am glad to see her moving in a direction that speaks promisingly of her having a long and successful acting career. She teetered on the brink of obscurity for a while there when she took off her clothes in the instantly forgettable urban drama Havoc in 2005, but she is now showing her true acting talents, which have previously been rarely seen anywhere.

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