**/****
starring Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mather Zickel, Bill Irwin
screenplay by Jenny Lumet
directed by Jonathan Demme
by Bill Chambers Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married has the cultural disadvantage of arriving soon after Margot at the Wedding and the personal one of following Claire Denis's 35 Shots in my screening log. Denis does so much more with so much less; perhaps sight-unseen, people have been calling this a return to form for Demme (as in, the form before The Silence of the Lambs created certain commercial expectations of/obligations in his work), but I don't remember him ever being this histrionic. And my heart sank a little when I saw that Declan Quinn, collaborating with Demme for the first time outside the documentary realm, had replaced the man who's photographed almost every one of Demme's fiction features to date, Tak Fujimoto, though I imagine the almost-painterly Fujimoto would have resisted Rachel Getting Married's Dogmé-influenced shooting style. Out on a weekend-pass from rehab, goth-y, parasitic Kim (Anne Hathaway, mannered and overmatched) returns home to disturb the shit before her older sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) marries African-American fiancé Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe, of TV on the Radio) and these long day's journeys into night are no longer viable. Unfortunately, the picture insists on pathologizing all the withering remarks and squirmy frankness via a Tragic Family Secret, making a kneejerk transition in the process from a caustic embarrassment comedy tempered by the director's trademark folksiness to a simply embarrassing melodrama for which a devout humanist like Demme seems overqualified. While I can't deny that Rachel Getting Married has some lovely grace notes in its plodding second half (see: a family tradition of competitive dish-stacking), it definitively jumps the shark with a wedding sequence (surely the most protracted since The Deer Hunter's) in which the film regains its comic footing in the worst way: because it's like a MAD MAGAZINE parody of a Jonathan Demme ceremony, complete with Sister Carol and Robyn Hitchcock performing, the groom inexplicably serenading his bride with Neil Young's "Unknown Legend," and Roger Corman in attendance. Sometimes it sucks to be an auteurist, but what can you do? PROGRAMME: Gala Presentations
