Finally saw RACHEL GETTING MARRIED, which is like a Demme film reunion party that everyone's invited to, but after you leave, you never see any of them again. And there's something about that which makes your own life seem, perhaps, empty by comparison. Unless, of course, you're lucky enough to have a non-dysfunctional artistic, musical, happy joyous and free, affluent family.
One of Demme's strengths has been the concert film and his unique ways of mixing live musical performances into his dramatic films (such as Sister Carol rapping over the end credits to Something Wild). For Rachel, Demme takes all the musicians he can grab and interweaves liberally with the tropes of not less than three indie film genres: the handheld camera Altmanesque overlapping dialogue "happening" fillm (The Anniversary Party and Margot at the Wedding being two other recent ceremony-centric examples); the multi-culti musical call for brotherhood film ((Michel Gondry's Block Party and Be Kind Rewind being recent examples); and the shaky handicam "recovery" film (Clean and Down to the Bone). Most of us can find something to love and relate to in this odd mix. But the question is, will it still love us, tomorrow?
The film begins its story through the eyes of Anne Hathaway's rehab veteran as she returns home to attend her sister's wedding and right there we're off to a cock-eyed start. The attempt to weld "indie recovery drama" to the Jonathan Demme cook-out music fest semi-documentary is valiant, but doomed to leave a lot of us alienated and disillusioned. I know lots of critics loooove this film. I myself loved it, while I watched it. Afterwards, I alienation slowly replace the warm fuzzy, the way a big fun wedding or dance party might leave you depressed--"blue Tuesday"ing it--all the next week. Somewhere in the world there's rich jet set club kids for whom the party never stops. The rest of us have to get back on the bus and go to work. Why give us a taste just to take it all away? Don't we have the right to our cynicism?
As someone in recovery, it's both enlightening and insulting to see how Demme contrasts the "hungry ghost" mentality with the selfless love and open-heartedness of the multi-racial musical everybody else, the stock regulars of past Demme efforts are here: Cousin Bobby conducts the ceremony, Robyn Hitchcock performs at the reception party, Neil Young is even name-checked, right after God. The only person who seems "real" at this wedding--as in anxious to leave--is Debra Winger as the divorced mom. The most ridiculously contrived scene comes when Winger and husband are trying to cut out and Rachel and Kym beg her to stay. Jesus Christ! It's late, the dinner and cake cutting is all over and done with. The only people still dancing are drunk. Let the lady go home for Christ's sake. The camera follows their car as it blurs into the out of focus rain. Somewhere you can feel Garrison Keillor sadly shaking his gentle head; Michael Moore still waving pictures of little dead girls at the grave of Charlton Heston.
There's some enabling/co-dependent undercurrents in the dialogue that could have been explored, but Demme glides right over them. Dad is a living saint, played by SESAME STREET regular Bill Irwin, a Mr. Rogers with a little better dress sense, A Ned Flanders with soul. Everyone who sees the film wants him for their dad, but we can see why Debra Winger's character left him, and part of us secretly wants to go with her. Noah Baumbach nailed this character far less sympathetically in the similar but more realistically acidic Margot at the Wedding in the form of John Turturo as the ex-husband. Demme doesn't seem to have enough dysfunction in his life to know where to dig for it, he can't see the sinner in the heart of the saint and vice versa. The closest he came to getting it right was in the bond between Clarice and Hannibal. 
Screenwriter Jenny Lumet comes from a musical and artistic family tree that includes grandma Lena Horne and dad Sidney Lumet; the perceptive, minutely fleshed out party chaos has the smack of a child's eye view, and she deserves a lot of credit for what works here. Yet how can one not feel jealous and a little bit tired after such a love song-packed and color-full union? I admit I was crying in several spots. I was washed up in its brotherly love tide. But now I feel bedraggled and run over. I have to go to a party like Rachel's wedding this weekend, actually, and I'm already dreading the fun I will have. 
Seeing Rachel in the Cineplex provided me with a meta-textual shock ending when I came across a poster for an upcoming Disney film, Bride Wars (2009) on my way back out to the lobby; this "return to mall culture" Hathaway move almost flipped me back into a jaundiced cynic right then and there. But I kept my communal love vibe alive through the night. Today though I'm all about the realization that I am who I am--the Debra Winger-Margot type "cold-hearted bitch"-- despite my believing in and hoping in the future of universal brotherly love evinced by the Obama presidency and Rachel Getting Married. Once the smoke clears and the empty cups are swept away, I'm still a cold Nordic drunk, outside the main tent, like John Wayne at the end of The Searchers. It's hard, damn hard, to keep your cynicism alive after walking out of the open-hearted Rachel Getting Married... but somehow we go on.
(Note: The preceding is based on a telephone conference with Kim Morgan of Sunset Gun, to whom some of the observations undoubtedly belong. Her Gun is my bible, amen.)
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Smoking in the rain outside the House of Demme
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13 comments:
Sorry to be snarky but I think you meant Sister Nancy and the credits to Something Wild. However I haven't seen Married to the Mob in a really long time.
Sister Nancy, thank you Mr. Snarky ... I mean anonymous!
As the Irish like to say, good crack. I haven't seen this yet but your take differs noticeably from the general sense that Rachel is a drab, dreary movie. Interesting. I love Stop Making Sense, but find Silence of the Lambs overrated and haven't seen any of the "smaller" Demme films from the 70s or 80s. For some reason, I have an ingrained prejudice that he's overrated. I'm not nuts about any of the three indie film genres you mention, though that's probably also a function of not being nuts about indie films in general. Another ingrained prejudice, I suppose. But where would we be without those?
You can say that again, MM0283. Wait, what did you say? I thought everyone loved Rachel Getting Married. They should. Maybe they're scared. They should be. Demme could eat their face. I can't believe you don't like Silence of the Lambs. Now its so cliche, but at the time--in the theater--it blew my hungover nervous system clear away. I watched it every day after work for like, three weeks once it came to video. It was a blurry dupe on SLP. What did we care back then about blu rays? We had faces! We had eaten faces.
I didn't get the sense from reviews that people didn't like it - most were pretty positive - but that they liked it with the knowledge that it was somewhat bleak.
As for Silence, I did get that vicarious thrill in '91, but through an uncle & aunt who gave me the run-down on each killer like they were members of the Seven Dwarfs (there's Eatey, and Skinny, and...). By the time I saw it I enjoyed it and a few years later found the gap between its acclaim and its conventionality irritating. However, I'm generally more forgiving of such things than I was a few years ago, so maybe the pendelum's swung back? Manhunter is not a very sensible movie, so I don't know that I'd hold it above Silence, but it does have that poetic flair that Silence seems to lack.
Not everyone liked Rachel. I went with four friends - none of them cineastes. Four hated the film. One liked it. The ones who hated it registered various complaints - that the long musical sequence bogged down the movie and constituted a structural weakness; that the 12-step stuff was superficial and cliched, though everyone liked Ann Hathaways performance; that giving everybody a camera made for a lot of dramatically dead scenes; that it was "faux Altman"; that it was a bunch of irritating PC yuppies working out their boring problems; etc. Most of the critics seemed to like the film, but moviegoers I talked to after the screening often hated it. A couple quietly cheered when one of the characters told that chamber group to shut up. Nobody I spoke with then and later regards Demme as a major filmmaker; they see him as middlebrow rather than profound.
Wow. As a fellow moviegoer in recovery (the reason for the anonymous nature of this post), I'd have to disagree with you on two points: A) I didn't believe, in any way, that the Dad was supposed to be regarded as "a Saint"; I thought he was clearly being presented as an utter codependent/ co-addict/ enabler type, taking a terrible toll on himself and the family (watch that dishwasher-loading scene again); and B) I didn't believe the departure of Debra Winger was presented with condescending Keillor-shaking-his-head judgment. You're right - it was late; it was time to go; and Rachel and her sister are still so wounded/ bitter/ resentful that they can't deal with it. Anyway, I loved the movie too.
If only we could believe that they'd still have that "Ethan plate" laying around among the dishes. It's just not credible, like most of the movie.
good point about the dishwasher scene, anonymous. For me, perhaps it was my mood, I felt like that scene was supposed to be more of a friendly rivalry "passing of the torch" moment... I do give Demme the benefit of the doubt that the subtextual dysfunction was intentional, but... but... at the time I was feeling that this was a "feel good" film about the joy of interracial musical family bonding with some hackneyed ORDINARY PEOPLE mcguffins thrown in, you know, for the thespians in the party to improv around. But maybe I be wrong. i think this is definitely a film that will likely change your mind about it after a second viewing, or even a third.
Rachel Getting Married was, I thought, overlong, creakily wedding the generes of television "women's film" to the structure of a thin problem play, which was further diluted with a lot of excess musical interludes and larded up with a lot of unnecessary camera shakes that didn't really make the movie seem like a documentary. During the latter parts of the film, when the wedding guests who seemed like bourgeois bohemians, hence awful, began to dance and dance and dance, I grew very impatient indeed, wondered when the hell all this was finally going to end with the non-conclusive none-the-less-therapeutic catharsis one knew was coming. The dead child as the source of guilt was canned poignance. I felt as you did, however, that Winger's urge to get away from this cloying family was justified. The only thing that I think makes this film special is Anne Hathaway's magnetic performance. I was reminded of the "buckle your seatbelts" sequence from All About Eve in which Margot Channing has, of course, been borish. She looks at the witty theater critic/gossip columnist and says something to the effect of "You diapprove me, don't you?" After giving her a glowing once over he replies, "You're maudlin and full of self pity. You're magnificent!" Hathaway keeps her performance pitched at this level almost for the entire length of the film, a character not only directed by her neuroses but one who has turned them into a schtick, a way of making herself the center of every scene. You want to give her a swift kick in the ass a lot of the time, but you can't help admiring the titanic vibrancy of her self-dramatization; I never tired of seeing her face. She's a work of art; she's a star. The scene where she's getting her hair done for the wedding and is approached by a co-mate from rehab who tells her how inspired he was by her made-up stories of childhood sexual abuse give us a small hint of what this film might have been if the dramatic structure of the thing hadn't been so banal.
P.S. I never cared for Silence of The Lambs either. Didn't scare me. I thought even at the time it came out the movie was really nothing more than mechanical high toned camp--somewhat amusing in small doses in the case of Anthony Hopkins; intolerable in the case of Foster hauling around that annoying accent.
Actually, it's Sister Carol, not Sister Nancy.
Loved the film.
Man, I was better off keeping it at Sister Souljah
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