Rachel Getting Married

Rachel Getting Married
 
Jonathan Demme is considered to be one of the greatest Directors of the past twenty years and yet when I look at his résumé, only one film springs up at me 'The Silence of the Lambs'. Everything else Demme has created has been a little hit and miss with even a powerful film like Philadelphia, a film which gained Tom Hanks his first Best Actor Oscar, a little slow and hard to watch. This is exactly the same with Rachel Getting Married.
 
Kym (Anne Hathaway) has returned from drug rehab on the weekend that her sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) is getting married. A arrival brings up a lot of family tensions which is escalated with the appearance of their estranged Mother (Debra Winger) as the family try to come together for Rachel's big day. This leads to a great deal of talk about redemption, history and past, sociology, love and the role of a family to support one another no matter what.
 
First up, if this was supposed to be like a documentary it would have been great, but the way the whole thing is filmed almost looks like it was done by an amateur. The shaky-cam, long shots and camera following characters way of filming which was so effective in things like This is Spinal Tap or Cloverfield just looked out of place with all the cuts within a scene. At times it looks like an amateur has filmed the actual footage and then a professional editor has been hired to make it into a film like The Blair Witch Project.
 
Watching Rachel Getting Married is like watching the home movie to a family you don't know and don't really have an interest in. It's like watching two hours of any Z-List celebrity documentary and wondering who thought this was entertainment? Though I can't fault the acting from everyone, particularly Anne Hathaway, watching the film felt like a rehash of the film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with so many staged arguments and conversations which, although I'm sure everyone can relate to, I just became tired of after a while. The problem also is that I could not become attached to any of the characters and slowly as the film progressed I simply stopped caring about them. Another problem is that after a while I started to notice that nothing was happening, I was watching them load a dishwasher and thinking 'Did I nudge my controller and I'm now watching How Clean is Your House?' No, I wasn't. At some point, writer Jenny Lumet (daughter of cinema legend Sidney Lumet) thought that what people would find entertaining was watching someone load up a dishwasher? And it isn't.
 
The disk is filled with extras, none of which I would recommend anyone viewing. Twenty minutes of deleted scenes makes you wonder why they were even shot in the first place. Two commentaries one by Producer Neda Armian, Writer Jenny Lumet and Editor Tim Squyres should have been interesting, but really the thoughts from three different areas of filming were just odd. Odder still is the second commentary by Rosemary DeWitt (Rachel) alone who really should have been partnered up with someone, even just one of the minor characters who she could at least talk to about certain aspects of the filming process. Both were just dull. Three featurettes are highlighted with one about the Wedding Band who play throughout most of the film and was slightly interesting aspect of the film that isn't really developed as much as they should have.
Rachel Getting Married is a film that I simply can't recommend and the people who are recommending it are seemingly doing so based on Hathaway's performance. This performance, for her, is amazing, but it's not exactly a performance (despite being Oscar nominated) that would make any top ten best female or acting performances. The film is slow, dull and sadly not entertaining which is a shame as I had such high hopes for it.