Rachel Getting Married

Jonathan Demme (2008)

The good sister is getting married and the bad sister is ready to take the scene in this intense family portait.

After spending 9 months in rehab Kym ( Anne Hathaway), comes back home for the wedding of her sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt). Her arrival home starts a landslide of emotions: love, hate, guilt, and conflicts never solved. She is an addict and her present and past behavior has affected the lives of all her family members. Rachel’s deep feelings for her troubled sister explode in a terrible argue where we are reminded just how words can cut even deeper in family fights. The absent mother, a great Debra Winger (welcome back!), is a woman that is not able to be a parent anymore, and maybe was never capable. The heroic moving figure of the father (Bill Irwin), is a man that sacrifices himself and his pain to keep his family united.

Jonathan Demme returns to fictions and mixes his passion for documentaries with a personal hand-held camera Dogma style and lets us be guests at this family reunion and gives us a moving, honest and beautiful film. With Demme we enter into a big Connecticut house and assist in the wedding preparations, dances, conversations, conflicts, pain, and witness a lot of love.

Writer Jenny Lumet (Sidney Lumet’s daughter at her first script) writes a complex female character that Anne Hathaway brings to life with an astonishing performance that will be remembered.

Jonathan Demme gives us another exellent movie, and his talent reminds us of what makes American cinema so extraordinary.