Rachel Getting Married (2008)

Good, and interesting, but could have been better. The dysfunctional family theme is well explored, but in the end the movie drifts, and, instead of ending with a bang, fizzles out.Anne Hathaway acts out of her skin and carries the film. She well deserved her Best Actress Oscar nomination (the award ultimately went to Kate Winslet for The Reader).

Story and acting are OK but not enough to overcome the amateur cinematography, poor sound mixing as well as poorly written dialogue. The whole film seems forced on every level. The writer obviously struggled for meaningful content so the Director used extended scenes with no dialogue to make the film feature-length. Much of the dialogue seemed ad- libbed and should have been cut. I guess the budget was too low to afford a steadicam but it would have been a great investment because the camera operators were just awful. The DP used some kind of filter that washed out the scenes and created inconsistent texture and resolution. I have seen higher quality productions from high school film clubs. I can't imagine watching this mess on a larger screen. I got dizzy watching it at home.

Hard to believe that it's been five years since Jonathan Demme's last full-length fiction film, now available for streaming on Amazon Prime. This time around, we were struck by how powerful and affecting the ensemble scenes are—the rehearsal dinner, the ceremony itself, even the much-maligned dishwasher-loading contest. These sequences feel like a kind of virtual reality in which we're not just emotionally engaged as spectators but almost physically present as participants. They were so effective, in fact, that the scenes that took place in less crowded rooms and explored the conflict between the sisters—serene bride-to-be Rachel and shattered, attention-hungry Kym—started to seem like a distraction, even though the script was just about perfect (also hard to believe this was Jenny Lumet's first produced screenplay) and the performances could hardly have been better. Ever since "Something Wild," Demme's been crazy for world music and multiculture, and in "Rachel…" every time you look around, somebody's plucking on an oud or sawing out a modal tune on a fiddle. Loved it! (Also loved the scene where Anna Deavere Smith tells them to knock it off.) Didn't mind the twitchy, crazed-wedding-videographer-in-everyone's-face camera-work. Clearly the dancing and festivating goes on for quite a while (though be honest now, what's a wedding reception without a samba troupe and break dancing?); maybe JD felt we had to experience a bit of celebratory burnout before the subdued, melancholy tone of the final scenes. The boho excesses of Rachel's family and the overstuffed production may give snarks and quibblers a lot to complain about, but all in all "Rachel…" is a brilliant, soulful film that should give you as much pleasure to remember as it does to experience.

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.