Reviewing Rachel Getting Married in the New York
Times, A.O. Scott writes
that the movie’s director, Jonathan Demme, “is the kind of
filmmaker who gives Hollywood liberalism a good name, and the
most striking aspect of Rachel Getting Married is how, without
overt ideological posturing, it paints a faithful and
affectionate (though hardly uncritical) portrait of blue-state
America.” Of course, what he means is not really that this
portrait is of “blue-state America,” a geographical entity that
has considerably expanded its borders since November 4 to include
some territory that Mr. Demme might find notably less congenial
than upscale suburban Connecticut, where his film is set. Rather,
it is of what so much of blue-state America likes to imagine
itself as being: a land of rich, cool, intellectual people who
are relentlessly and joyously multicultural and morally and
politically progressive. Above all, they are filled to the brim
with compassion for the world’s many, many victims — among whom
they contrive to number themselves.
In spite of the title in which, for once, she is ironically given
top billing, the central figure is not Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt)
but her fragile and messed-up sister Kym (Anne Hathaway), who is
returning from rehab to the Connecticut manor of their father
Paul (Bill Irwin) and his new wife Carol (Anna Deavere Smith),
where Rachel’s wedding to Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe), a successful
black musician, is about to take place. This is a film about the
venting of suppressed feelings and the airing of old grievances,
about therapeutic striving in the context of the whole moral
economy of the family’s recent history. And yet, apart from the
odd oblique comment — like that of Sidney’s mother when she
remarks on the comity and ostentatious friendliness between the
two families at the rehearsal dinner that “This is how it is in
heaven” — it never once mentions the inter-racial aspect of the
match. That should tell you all you need to know about its moral
self-satisfaction.
In fact, Sidney and his family are pretty much reduced to props.
They don’t have any divisive family battles or secrets.
As a background to the family drama in which they are otherwise
minimally involved, Sidney and his musician friends are
constantly strumming on instruments and making informal music, or
breaking into some more finished number, ostensibly in
preparation for the ceremony. Along with Mr. Demme’s frequent
resort to the Steadicam, the extreme close-up and the use of
ambient noise to suggest a documentary, or cinéma vérité
style, this emphasis on what I take to be a kind of world music
helps to create atmosphere. It also gives the black folks
something to do, other than being black, while at the same time
serving as a kind of benediction by the less fortunate races of
the world upon these highly privileged Americans and their
problems.
There is a long-standing rivalry between Rachel and Kym both in
general and in particular with respect to their father’s
affection, which is involuntarily but disproportionately bestowed
upon the ne’er-do-well Kym in preference to the good girl,
Rachel. That would be hard enough to cope with by itself, but it
is further complicated here by a bit of family history that
gradually emerges as the preparations for the wedding unfold to
overshadow everything. And here I must issue a spoiler alert. In
fact, a double spoiler alert. So stop reading now if you plan to
see the film — even though I don’t recommend you do — and think
that the minimal suspense involved in waiting to discover what
was the family trauma and how and why it happened will
substantially add to the pleasures the film has to offer. It
might, too, given that those pleasures are so meager and limited
almost entirely to the rather voyeuristic one of watching the
excellent Miss Hathaway as a neurotic, hollow-eyed junkie.
Actually, there is not much of a secret made of the family
trauma, which is that Kym, as a 16-year-old and more or less
permanently high on prescription pain-killers, having been asked
to baby-sit for her younger brother, Ethan, got into a car
accident that killed him. But, come to think of it, I can’t spoil
the other bit of the withheld information because it is never
actually revealed in the film itself. At one point, Kym confronts
her mother, Abby (Debra Winger), since divorced from her father
and herself remarried, on just this question: “What were you
thinking?” she asks her. “Why would you leave a drug addict to
watch your son?” But mom has no answer to give, beyond a slap
across the face, and if Kym has any suspicions about the answer,
she doesn’t share them with us. Maybe mom just hadn’t wanted to
know that her daughter was a drug addict.
But, reading between the lines, I would guess that there is
another family secret not being revealed here. Perhaps mom was
having an affair with the man who is now her husband. Generally
speaking, Miss Winger’s performance is meant to suggest a woman
whose own happiness takes precedence with her over that of her
children. But Mr. Demme and his screenwriter, Jenny Lumet
(daughter of Sidney), are content merely to make the suggestion
that Ethan’s death might be really Abby’s fault — and
in a way that might be particularly shaming to
traditional ideas of what it means to be a wife and mother. If
so, the family might be covering up the truth, hiding it
even from themselves, and allowing Kym alone to bear the burden
of guilt — along with its various social, amatory and
pharmacological consequences — for everyone’s self-indulgence.
It might be their way of refusing anything less than total
commitment to the therapeutic doctrine of personal
self-fulfillment so much beloved of “Hollywood liberalism.”
All this is entirely hypothetical, of course. But if the family
is not hiding from the truth, the movie certainly is — and
probably has to do so if its portrait of “blue state America” is
to remain more “faithful and affectionate” than it is critical.
