HTM!!! Imagine Robert Redford’s Ordinary People–hopped up on steroids—colliding into a three-day “One World†music festival (you know: Peter Gabriel, Amadou and Mariam, Beausoleil, Damon Alburn, Jorge Ben, Clube Do Balanço, Manu Chao, Daft Punk, Toots and the Maytals, Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni Ba, and, yes, TV on the Radio). I’ve grown highly suspect of movies about white people living in seven million dollar Connecticut estates; all this east coast, upper-class, boho bonhomie starts to scratch away at my spleen. No matter how many virtuous, upstanding people of color Jonathan Demme pours into the frame, Rachel Getting Married is still an over-the-top American tragedy about white people in carefully appointed rooms. That being said, Anne Hathaway gives a stunning, transcendent, raw and emotional, career-changing performance. It’s the best acting I’ve seen on the big screen since Daniel Day Lewis drilled for oil. If only Jenny Lumet had toned down the dramaturgical dead ends and shrill histrionics and Demme had exiled the great majority of his buddies and family members to the catering tables (I kept expecting Spalding Gray to return from the dead), the film might have settled in on a potentially lacerating evisceration of family dysfunction . . . but no, this is a world where Robyn Hitchcock sings songs in the backyard during a reception best described as a coalition of rainbows . . . I’ll take Margo at the Wedding, thank you.
htm?
Hoist Thursday’s meat!!!
Hit the midget!!!
Hypertext markup!!!
Hungarian twat monkey!!!
Hurl that marlin!!!
Heterocyclic teratogen manometer!!!
Hairy testicles moistened!!!
Hate this movie!!!
…lol
hot tranny mess . . . though “hate this movie” is a good one. I also like “hurl that marlin” but I worry about “hairy testicles moistened.”
Urban dictionary, huh? I get my dictionaries from the REAL America.
i like your reviews a lot lately jeff. which ones of those musicians should i make an effort to get to know?
I suggest Amadou and Mariam, Manu Chao, and TV on the Radio.
ugh. this films is sad and jeff’s review of it perfect. definitely ordinary people TRIES to meet margo at the wedding, minus the genius or even any spark of originality. in other words, like jeff suggests, this film has been done a million times. the dialogues are so stale and spent and stagy, you wonder whether the filmmaker means to make you feel that the root of the problem is that these people don’t know how to talk like normal people. and what’s with all the hilarity during the wedding rehearsal performances? they are not funny. kim (hathaway), in fact, gives the best speech, and no one laughs or hoots or cheers or claps. i wonder whether demme is aware of the phoniness of it all, or whether it was done entirely unironically. i wonder about this a lot when i see american families portrayed on film. WHY DO PEOPLE LAUGH SO DAMN MUCH?! IT’S NOT FUNNY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
but here’s something that is actually pretty offensive. much as anyone speaks, sydney, the black groom, barely says a word. everyone gabs on and on, but this guy is basically mute.
and why is it always mothers who get really fucked, and who fuck up their children? i am tired of sick mothers. can we have healthy mothers, please?
actually debra winger was just about as good as anne hathaway in this film. both amazing, both gorgeous, both sexy as hell. i agree with jeff, margo at the wedding any day of the year.
Rachel Getting Married is not my kind of movie (it is, after all, defiantly middlebrow) but I am not master of my own queue so I watched it. It does not deserve the opprobrium heaped on it by Jeff and Gio. It is not a great movie by any means, and it indulges in two set-piece confrontations that unnecessarily ramp up the melodrama (though some melodrama is surely inherent in a movie such as this, and the dialogue was improvised, so much of what is being captured comes from the dynamic between the actors not Jenny Lumet).
But there are countless small pleasures which make this better than the usual family drama. First and foremost, the camerawork is as good anything I have watched in a long while. Demme uses a documentary style, and inquisitive handheld cameras poke around every scene, surveying the audience as someone speaks, jumping back and forth between protagonists, capturing the emotions of secondary characters. Two stand out: Kym, out of focus in the background, at an AA meeting while others share; the last scene over the credits as Rachel sits in the garden and watches Sidney talking to friends and idly petting a dog. Each scene grasps perfectly a set of emotions in a few seconds without words.
I don’t understand Gio’s accusation of offensiveness regarding Sidney. The contrast between the volubility of the immediate family and the bemusement of that of the groom is clearly intentional. Sidney is trying to figure out the family dynamics and to avoid taking sides. One lovely moment: after the rehearsal dinner they all go back to the house and Rachel and Kym fight, while the father (an endearingly hapless Bill Irwin) tries to get them to make nice. When they part, Sidney puts his hand on Kym’s back, just for a moment, to show empathy. This is a person he met earlier that day, and who just had a furious argument with the woman he loves, but that gesture — captured in an image not words — establishes his character.
noble, tender-hearted, simple savage?
why can’t he have witty lines like everyone else?
What? Are you being deliberately insulting? What in the movie deserves your characterization of Sidney as a simple savage? The dishwasher loading contest alone establishes him as one of the more interesting and complex characters. And since you found the dialogue stale and unfunny, would you wish that equivalent lines had been foisted on him?
who am i insulting? i’m only explaining how it seems to me that the character of sydney is portrayed. so he’s good at loading the dishwasher. bah. but hey chris, if you liked the movie, it’s all cool. really.
I didn’t love the movie, but I thought it interesting enough to be worth not dismissing on the grounds of either alleged classism or racism.
The dishwasher scene is apparently based on a real argument that Jenny Lumet observed between her father (hum, also named Sidney) and Bob Fosse. How can two grown men become competitive over who loads a dishwasher more efficiently? Apparently with ease.
are you kidding? apart from the fact the grown and ungrown men and women can become competitive at the drop of a hat over nothing, dishwasher loading is a fine fine art.
Rachel was a lot better than Tell No One, but I still didn’t like it.
Bob Fosse in a dishwasher contest with Sidney Lumet? Was this research for The Wiz? How precious. I wonder if Fosse ended up with dishwater jazz hands. Chris, I too thought it was well shot, and Demme is no slouch (though he is nepotistic to a fault). I also think Debra Winger deserves more love. She was probably, after Hathaway, the most interesting character on the screen. In fact, she actually leaves you wanting more, which is saying a lot given the histrionics in which this film wallows. And I can’t beat up on Sidney too much (save the Neil Young nonsense). He’s mostly a non-entity (not necessarily noble savage but noble and peripheral nonetheless) and really doesn’t have much of a character (his friends/best men are far more interesting), but I blame Lumet. Sidney does, however, bring a sense of reassuring calm into a room which I appreciated. I wish I could have enjoyed Rosemarie DeWitt more, but, again, I blame the screenwriter (that being said, she totally redeems herself in the excellent “United States of Tara”).