3.09.2009

live it out: rachel getting married


Poster of a girl.

There is much to recommend in Jonathan Demme's latest for fans of wedding rehearsals, nervous smoking, or people sitting on couches and talking about their feelings; for other viewers, Rachel Getting Married is a long meander tracking Kym (Anne Hathaway), a one-time model, on a weekend furlough from rehab to her loving father's Connecticut home for her brilliant sister Rachel's wedding. While Demme shoots for the jumpy, hand-held feel that Steven Soderbergh has mined with much skill and success over the last few years - the jerky-jump cut being something Soderbergh has refined into a trademark that he can deploy with all the smoothness of George Clooney's smile, a power-move that does not detract from what's on the screen - Demme does not score with it, and all-too-often RGM comes across as clunky and self-conscious, straining to break out of the contraints of basic Hollywood melodrama Jenny Lumet's script ties the proceedings up in.

Hathaway's Oscar-nominated performance is solid, and she and Demme deserve some praise for making the lovely actress' every appearance in a scene something like a thumb in the eye, but the work's lost, since we soon lose sight of why we're here and why we're watching Kym struggle to relate to people or fuck up at every opportunity: in the end, Rachel Getting Married is exactly what it says it is, and nothing more.

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