Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married. (Courtesy photo)

Directed by: Jonathan Demme
Starring: Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin, Anne Hathaway, Anna Devere Smith, Debra Winger
Rating: R

Twenty years ago Jonathan Demme was a risk-taking director whose streak of offbeat gems had gone from Melvin & Howard (1980) through Something Wild (1986) to peak with the joyous, wacko Married to the Mob (1988). Then came Silence of the Lambs—terrific, terrifying, and seemingly devoid of Demme’s personality. Suddenly the movies got heavy (Philadelphia, Beloved), and the man who mixed slapstick and intense drama with near Billy Wilder-like ability had become just another director. Demme found his stride instead in documentaries like The Agronomist and Jimmy Carter, Man From Plains. And he never lost his deep-rooted love of music. Demme has danced back into his element with Rachel Getting Married. Imbued with the low-budget spirit of his early Roger Corman apprenticeship and overflowing with music, Rachel Getting Married is clearly a personal film. It’s also just as clearly a personal script by Jenny Lumet. The movie is bursting with rich performances and beautifully calibrated scenes. But it would have been good if someone had kept Demme from throwing quite so much personality in. It’s as if he’d been saving it up for nearly two decades and it all came flowing out at once. That sometimes leaves Lumet’s script stuck in the background of what at times is more like a shared experience than a narrative film.

Kim (Anne Hathaway) leaves yet another round of rehab to go to the wedding of her sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt). Kim is far from recovered, and her destructive self-absorption proceeds to wreak havoc on Rachel, her father, and stepmother (Bill Irwin and Anna Devere Smith), her mother (Debra Winger), and everyone else. As the big old Connecticut house reverberates with music, Kim continually draws the focus away from Rachel, and in doing so revives very painful family history.

The meaty emotional showdowns between Kim and Rachel, Kim and her mother, Kim and her father will be replayed in acting classes for years. Jenny Lumet (daughter of director Sidney Lumet) has written a debut screenplay of blistering honesty, and Demme has created an environment that allows for equally honest performances. Demme shoots the movie almost entirely with a hand-held camera, making it feel even more real. In fact sometimes it even seems to be the point. Not everyone needs to toast at the rehearsal dinner, and was there really time for this many musical acts during the wedding? Still, Lumet and Demme do many things right—like making sure not to force it all into a neat package by the end. In most movies families solve all of their problems in a long weekend. Little gets resolved in Rachel Getting Married, yet for all its emotional turbulence, the experience is far more exhilarating than dispiriting.

Anne Hathaway gives what may be her best performance as Kim. But even at full sprint she doesn’t keep up with the outstanding supporting cast. Hathaway is clearly intelligent and can convey a lot with her vulnerable eyes. But her Achilles heel remains her voice. Her inflections do get less mannered as Kim’s emotions intensify. But her job is to make us like Kim while she is still being a huge nuisance, and for too much of the movie we wish they’d just send her away. Conversely, you might not be able to get enough of Rosemarie DeWitt, who manages to play longsuffering without ever turning too saintly. After five years in minor film roles and brief runs on TV series (including Mad Men), DeWitt will be in demand for a long time to come; she’s sensational. I’ve generally found Debra Winger’s most lauded performances of the past—Terms of Endearment, Shadowlands—to be overrated. But she is heartbreakingly good as a woman who has put up such thick walls to her past, she can’t engage the present. Bill Irwin, the masterful clown who most recently won acclaim and a Tony for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe, can get a bit cutesy as the befuddled father. But he’s also irresistible, grabbing any face he can find with two hands and kissing it. The other standout in the uniformly great supporting cast is Mather Zickel. Zickel played a spot-on Bill Murray in the Gilda Radner TV biopic It’s Always Something, and he is incredibly charming as the best man and fellow recovering addict.

Rachel Getting Married has proven to be a surprisingly divisive film, with opponents most often citing Hathaway and the directorial indulgences. I struggled with both, but still really enjoyed the film. Rachel Getting Married may not cover any new ground in on-screen family relations, but it’s smart, messy, and absolutely full of life.

Alex Manugian lives in Sherman Oaks, California. He grew up in Groton and has reviewed movies for Harvard residents for many years.