Rachel Getting Married

In director Johnathen Demme's Rachel Getting Married, Rachel's sister, Kym played by Anne Hathaway has been an addict since she was in her teens. (Which drugs? All of them.) For the occasion, she is being let out of rehab for the weekend. The last actress you'd expect to see cast as a self-loathing, frayed-nerves drug casualty is a red-carpet blossom like Hathaway. Yet from the moment she shows up, her eyes peering with a junkie's paranoid radar from beneath her slashed-with-a-straight-razor hair, the actress wires you right into her rage and awareness. Kym is a walking disaster, but a disaster with feelings, and the effect she has upon her family is to electrify them with the dreaded truths she calls up. Hathaway is a revelation: She makes toxic narcissism mesmerizing. I don't think I've ever seen a wedding film that made me feel the way this one does, as if I wasn't just crashing the event but was part of the family. In a rehearsal dinner that sprawls on, the speeches are so revealing, stirring up so many awkward, touching moments, that it's as if you've known everyone in the room for years. That level of realism turns the most microscopic of interactions into drama, and that's the level Demme is working on here. It helps that the script, by Jenny Lumet (Sidney's Lumet's daughter), is a fully woven web of love, jealousy, and enabling demons.  Rachel Getting Married is a triumph Demme's finest work since The Silence of the Lambs, and a movie that tingles with life.

5 out of 5

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one luv, Toinne