Rachel Getting Married (2008)

USA, 113 minutes
Director: Jonathan Demme
Writer: Jenny Lumet
Photography: Declan Quinn
Cast: Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin, Debra Winger, Tunde Adebimpe, Mather Zickel, Anna Deavere Smith, Anisa George

Is it possible that this is Jonathan Demme's best movie? I have long thought he is most winning the closer to music (or performance, in the case of Swimming to Cambodia) that he manages to stay—most conspicuously Stop Making Sense, of course, which if not still the greatest concert film ever made certainly is on the short list of them, and I don't know what else is close. This movie comes chockablock with music, chiefly in the form of the joyful and spontaneous and heartfelt contributions to the wedding that sits at its center (including Demme's son Brooklyn playing "The Wedding March" on an electric guitar). Some spectacular business otherwise here as well, including Anne Hathaway's performance, which occasionally feels studied but more often is one she simply disappears into like something taken by the wind, painful, cringe-inducing, probably a little overwritten, but profoundly demanding to be taken on its own 12-step recovery terms. I think overall it's one of the most faithful and unsentimental renditions of the experience that I've seen yet. This is often filmed like a documentary, heavy on the handheld camera and the strange jerks and sweeps and odd frames of a restless camera on the move—although just as often the framing is deliberate and surprising and perfect—and, too, it often feels staged like an Altman picture, with characters and dialogue cascading and swirling in and out of it, until finally sometimes the only way to cope is simply to give in to the sensory overload and let the threads pull you which ways they will. For once the travails of the poor put-upon clichéd upper-middle-class American dysfunctional family, complete with divorce and substance abuse and rehab and siblings who die in childhood and that old favorite, the perennial Cold Mother (here done to a tee by Debra Winger), are counterbalanced with a genuine sense of the lovingness that can accompany such sad sacks and their connections and actually goes quite a ways towards explaining what they're all doing hanging around together in the first place. In fact, some of the scenes at the rehearsal dinner and then at the wedding itself—notably Tunde Adebimpe facing Rosemarie DeWitt, the titular Rachel, at the altar, taking her hands in his, gazing into her face, and getting off a breathtakingly poised serenade to her of Neil Young's "Unknown Legend"—are nothing less than transcendent, beautiful moments that remind that life may be a funny old dog but, in such moments, is probably worth it all, even if fleetingly. Some people always cry at weddings. I always cry at this.