cinemajesty
Film Review: "Rachel Getting Married" (2008)Director Jonathan Demme (1944-2017) gives into documentary-composed cinematography in this film about the character of Kym, portrayed in break-out fashion and chain-smoking on the plain actress Anne Hathaway, who gives in to every beat to be the black sheep in the herd of a family celebrating the older sister's wedding, title-given character of Rachel, performed by decent appearing actress Rosemarie DeWitt, which stays uneventful through a screenplay originally written by Jenny Lumet, who finds one major tension point for the audience, watching the character of Kym's distress in witnessing honor speeches in a tight stuffed of invited wedding guests before releasing her pressure through sex with a stranger, degrading her sister in public and crashing a car, which may keep the audience going up to 85 Minutes due to a demanding performance by Anne Hathaway, but not for the whole 100 minutes plus running time on this one, where the director of a motion picture classic as "The Silence Of The Lambs" (1991) and even the fairly suspenseful remake of "The Manchurian Candidate" (2004) can not hide the fact that "Rachel Getting Married" has turned out a disappointment in every cinematic sense of the way.© 2017 Felix Alexander Dausend (Cinemajesty Entertainments LLC)
srhope-34746
I couldn't bear to watch much of this film, even though I'd bought the DVD for 50p. The clichéd, nauseating shaky-cam (this from a director who'd used superb cinematography in Stop Making Sense or Silence of the Lambs); the use of cigarette smoking as a marker of authenticity against health-loving fakeness (that has to stop, it's been used far too often and is not admirable); the self-love of the editor & director manifested by the overlong scenes; the rampant virtue-signalling via strange choices of ethnic diversity in casting... what's not to hate? Perhaps the Julia Roberts class of rom-com has something going for it, after all, but I certainly prefer Woody Allen's less showy approach.
Paul DesRoches
There are a few aspects that make this film tedious and almost painful to give your full & undivided attention to, but if you wish to behold a deep exploration of human emotional drama that is rarely witnessed on film, this one does deliver that and more. I agree with the aversion to the hand-held camera style, and the overly long scenes, and the saturation of unusual and unexciting musical accompaniment throughout, (actually portrayed as part of a scene when the actors themselves can't bear it any longer) and the perhaps overdone emphasis on cultural diversity and universal love as portrayed at the rehearsal dinner, for instance. But the core of the film is about nuclear family relationships, and the stress on members in the aftermath of an irresponsible accident that causes the loss of an innocent, all blamed on Rachel's sister, Kym, played by Anne Hathaway. She's a struggling newly reformed substance abuser/addict with a very heavy heart and a desperate need to be forgiven and to be loved by those whom she has hurt the most. Her current addiction is limited to cigs and self-obsessiveness, much to her detriment, and the challenges to sibling and parental love are taken to great lengths during this intense family drama, but with an underlying sense of survival that promises to emerge from the emotionally painful struggles.Not a "happy" movie per se, but one that is full of realism and leaves us with a sense that, in time, the lives of the protagonists will survive the strains on their respective hearts and minds. One aspect of this film I found most interesting is the apparent complete lack of cultural prejudices in all instances, and the total acceptance and loving nature of all those of various racial and cultural backgrounds that permeates the environment around the nuptials. In the midst of such a highly civilized group of such divergence, the focus is shifted to such a small subset of human relationships. It brings a kind of macroscopic focus to the center of the story.
Will Merrett
Rachel Getting Married is supposed to be a story about a girl's challenge in dealing with the fact her family is moving on with their individual lives while she has to deal with sobriety after getting out of rehab. This happens just as her sister Rachel is getting married. Hence the title. This may have been an acting tour De force for a young Anne Hathaway but unfortunately it was with a poorly cooked script that has zero character development and does nothing to make us like the characters in it. Screen writing 101 tells that you must have the characters do or show something that makes us like them so we can get behind them and cheer for them as they grow throughout the story. If you miss this very important step, you have an audience that is disconnected and does not care about the characters. If the audience does not care, why are you making the movie?Jonathan Demme obviously had a ton of favours to repay when he cast this nag as each scene is filled to overflowing with actors, and non-actors who are delivering lines that do nothing to move the story forward. The Wedding Rehearsal Dinner scene is painful to endure as actor after actor gets up to deliver another inane monologue that is useless. Demme repaid everyone of these non-actors with a part in this film to the detriment of the movie and at the expense of the audience. He also let the scenes run waaaaaaay too long and seemed to not know when to get out of each one. This is a huge mistake and something you expect from much less experienced directors.
AD
