Rachel Getting Married is about Kym (Anne Hathaway), who gets released from 12-step rehab to attend her sister Rachel's wedding at the upper-class Connecticut home of their dad and step-mother. Kym's selfish ways soon produce family and sisterly drama that shake up what is supposed to be a happy affair.
Hathaway (Get Smart, The Devil Wears Prada, Brokeback Mountain) gives a pretty wrenching performance. She gives it her all but I'm not entirely sure it was Oscar-nominee worthy for best actress.
The movie begins promisingly with snappy dialogue, but takes an awful long time to get to character building and back stories. It dwells on the wedding celebration far too long at the end with a seemingly endless series of musicians playing different types of music. I guess this should have been expected since Rachel Getting Married was directed by Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia), who has a long line of directing credits for rockumentaries like Stop Making Sense, Neil Young: Heart of Gold, and Storefront Hitchcock (about psych-popper Robyn Hitchcock, who incidentally has a too-small role in Rachel Getting Married).
**1/2 out of ***** stars
I'd agree with all you said, but I think the reason why Hathaway's performance was seen as 'great' was that there was this built in requirement of dynamism.
ReplyDeleteTo get in the spirit of passover:
- If she had just been coming out of rehab... Dyanu
- If she had just done drugs while her brother was around...Dyanu
- If she had just (spoilers)...Dyanu
-If she had just yelled at her mother about it...Dyanu.
She is also the angina of the moment. The next Audrey Hepburn-crap.