Rachel Getting Married (2008)

You know how at the beginning of Manchester by the Sea the inciting tragic event happens and your like "oh that's sad", but later on you find about an earlier even more tragic incident and your like "oh that's much sadder", well Rachel Getting Married is kind of like that. At the beginning of the film Kym Buchman (Anne Hathaway) gets let out of rehab for a three day furlough to attend the wedding of her older sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt), this awkward inciting situation gets even sadder when the family is forced to again reckon with the legacy of an earlier tragedy. This is probably the best dramatic performance I've ever seen from Ms. Hathaway, she was deservedly Oscar nominated for it (losing to Kate Winslet for The Reader, which was the right call but Anne is still really good). I also really liked Bill Irwin in this, in fact I liked pretty much everyone in this, it's a strong ensemble cast, and no one is really a caricature here, these people seem real, they're  complicated, their is character progression but its not all in a straight line.

There is of course the central dramatic narrative which the film is ostensibly about, but its not only about that, as Roger Ebert says in his review of the film it is very much about 'the wedding' as an idea and as an experience. You have a parade of toasts at the rehearsal dinner, you have all the preparatory stuff, you have the wandering around at the reception, the awkward receiving lines. Director Jonathan Demme made sure there was a big cast of guests around, you don't get to meet all of them but you see them, many of them repeatedly, at the dinner, at the ceremony, at the reception. These people are all connected of course, they went to Rachel's wedding, but you don't always know how they are connected, though you get to where you know faces, people in the background of shots that you've seen before, it makes it feel more intimate, more real. In fact many of the guests were people that Demme knew personally, a kind of extended family, including an early boss B-movie titan Roger Corman, a patriarch of cinema whose character wants everyone to know that he is a lawyer.

In an ironic turn of phrase I can't overstate the subtlety of the film. There are so many nice little touches to it, character quarks, the complicated and often contradictory motivation of individuals, that combination of the sublime and the petty that is family. It's a beautiful thing, its deep, and you get to comfortably move around a large beautiful house filled with friends and family, its a long, intimate party by proxy. It's really something. ****