Review: Rachel Getting Married

Kym (Anne Hathaway) is that family member that everybody speaks about in hushed tones before a major gathering, all full of smiles upon hearing of her imminent presence but secretly hoping that something will get in the way and she just won't show up. Everybody loves her, however grudgingly, but nobody wants her to ruin things, and everybody knows that she's the exact type who would ruin things just to look upon the rubble.

Compounding this is the fact that the reason Kym is coming home is for her sister Rachel's (Rosemary DeWitt) wedding. Her fiancee Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe, lead singer of indie outfit TV On The Radio) has arranged for a festive wedding filled with music and culture, but without much warning, Rachel feels her big day being taken over by Kym, who's been let out of rehab for two days to be a part of the festivities. Kym seems hell-bent on centering attention on her despite wanting desperately to be a part of the wedding, and to Rachel's great dismay, her father (Bill Irwin) plays right into Kym's hands.

The thing I find most fascinating about this film is that Rachel is not played for sympathy; in the case of a lesser script, she would be irritating and childish, but a damaged young girl desperately needed to be loved would constantly be lurking just beneath the surface. Instead, we are shown all of Kym, all the lovability and the manipulation and the self-destruction that brought her to the point in her life at which we meet her. We are given a very valid reason for the family's tentative approach to her, and we are given explanations, but we can also see that Kym has serious troubles that she has to fix on her own.

Jonathan Demme, director of an eclectic mix of films including "The Silence of the Lambs," has shot the entire film with handheld cameras, giving the picture a documentary feel, though God help us all if we ever see a story this venomous unfold in an actual documentary. From the very first scenes of the film, Kym is bitterly abrasive, railing against anybody who tries to show her affection while simultaneously clawing at everybody for it. Rachel, meanwhile, is furious that her sister's attention-grabbing fits are going to steal her wedding day away, and as we learn, Kym has already taken a considerable amount away from Rachel.

Hathaway, as Kym, gives what is by a mile her best performance here, as she is beautiful enough that we can see why Kym is so good at getting whatever she wants out of life, but at the same time, there is a damaged quality to her that makes the audience want to reach out and hold her and reassure her that she will be alright. For reasons I will not reveal, at the end of the film Kym ends up bruised and battered, and in the film's loveliest scene, as Rachel does in fact get married, Kym looks proudly at her sister, smiling radiantly with a massive black eye.