Rachel Getting Married


Rachel Getting Married is a 2008 American drama film directed and produced by Jonathan Demme and written by Jenny Lumet. It stars Anne Hathaway as a young woman temporarily released from rehab who returns home for the weekend for her sister's wedding. Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin, Tunde Adebimpe, Mather Zickel, Anna Deavere Smith, and Debra Winger appear in supporting roles.
The film had its world premiere at the 65th Venice International Film Festival on September 3, 2008, and was theatrically released in the United States on October 3, by Sony Pictures Classics. It received positive reviews from critics, who praised the performances of the cast and Lumet's screenplay. It earned a leading six nominations, including Best Feature, at the 24th Independent Spirit Awards. For her performance, Hathaway was nominated for Best Actress at the 81st Academy Awards, the 80th National Board of Review Awards, the 66th Golden Globe Awards, and the 15th Screen Actors Guild Awards, and won the same category at the 14th Critics' Choice Awards.
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Plot

Kym Buchman is released from rehab for a few days to attend her older sister Rachel's wedding at their childhood home. While friends and family prepare for the festivities, Kym struggles to reintegrate with them, as her history of substance abuse has made her the black sheep of the family.
Despite Kym's nine months of sobriety, her father Paul is uncomfortable with her driving, leading her to bike to a mandated drug test and Narcotics Anonymous meeting. She returns home and is introduced to Rachel's fiancé Sidney and his best man Kieran. Recognizing each other from the meeting, Kym and Kieran have sex, and he reveals that Rachel's best friend Emma will be her maid of honor. Kym confronts her sister, and it becomes clear that Kym's self-destructive behavior has caused a deep rift between them.
Rachel resents the attention her sister is drawing away from the wedding, exacerbated by Kym's behavior at the rehearsal dinner: amid toasts from friends and family, Kym awkwardly jokes about her addiction and "makes amends" with Rachel and others in the gathering for her past actions, as part of her twelve-step program. Later Rachel, angry at what she thinks is Kym's insincere and inappropriate "amends", erupts at Kym and the two engage in an intense argument, which Rachel ends by announcing she is pregnant, to the delight of everyone but Kym.
At another NA meeting, Kym reveals that she lives with the guilt of having accidentally killed her younger brother, Ethan. As a teen, an intoxicated Kym was driving Ethan home but lost control of the car and drove into a lake, where he drowned. Back home, a disagreement between Sidney and Paul about loading the dishwasher turns into a friendly competition, which is cut short when Paul finds a plate that belonged to his late son.
The day before the wedding, the bridal party visits a salon, where Kym is approached by a man she met at rehab years ago. He thanks her for having inspired him with her stories of overcoming trauma; overhearing this and realizing these stories were lies, Rachel storms out, angry that Kym would lie about having been molested by an uncle or tending to an anorexic sister.
Tensions flare between the sisters when Rachel tells the family that Kym was untruthful during her treatment, and that she has never forgiven Kym for their brother's death. Kym acknowledges that any amount of progress she makes may never make her worthy of forgiveness and drives off in her father's car to her mother Abby's home. Kym's attempt to find closure backfires when Abby refuses to take responsibility for leaving Kym with Ethan when she knew her daughter was an addict, culminating in a physical altercation.
Distraught, Kym crashes the car in what may have been an attempted suicide, but survives. The morning of the wedding, she is woken in the car by police and passes a field sobriety test, then is driven home and makes her way to Rachel's room. Seeing Kym's bruised face, Rachel tenderly bathes and dresses her sister, discovering Kym's tattoo of a rose with "Ethan" tattooed beneath it.
Amid a festive Indian theme, Rachel and Sidney are wed. Kym is the maid of honor and is overcome with emotion as the couple exchange their vows. She tries to enjoy herself throughout the reception, but continues to feel alienated and plagued by her dispute with Abby, who leaves early despite Rachel's effort to bring them together. The next morning, as Kym returns to rehab, Rachel runs out of the house to hug her.

Production

The screenplay was written by Jenny Lumet, the daughter of director Sidney Lumet and granddaughter of Lena Horne. Lumet, a junior high school drama teacher, had written four earlier screenplays, but this was the first to be produced. The film was directed by Jonathan Demme, and was shot in Stamford, Connecticut in a naturalistic style. The working title for the film was originally Dancing with Shiva.
Sidney Lumet himself approached Demme about his daughter Jenny's script. Demme has commented that he loved Jenny's flagrant disregard for the rules of formula, her lack of concern for making her characters likable in the conventional sense, and for what he considered to be her bold approach to truth, pain, and humor.
Filming took 33 days and occurred in late 2007.

Casting

Demme had wanted to work with Anne Hathaway ever since he spotted her in a crowd at a screening five years earlier. He immediately took her in consideration for the lead role. Hathaway later said of her first reading Lumet's script: "I was in my old apartment in the West Village Manhattan, just pacing back and forth between the kitchen table and the couch. I somehow wound up on the floor sobbing by the last page."
Rosemarie DeWitt was considered by the film's casting directors. Demme and the rest of the crew were impressed and immediately wanted her to play Rachel. Bill Irwin is a personal friend of Demme's.
Tunde Adebimpe's role, Sidney, was originally offered to American film director Paul Thomas Anderson while he was working on the post-production of the movie There Will Be Blood.
Demme was concerned about Debra Winger's interest in doing the film, but he pumped up his courage to ask her because they had met several times before at the Jacob Burns Center, a film center close to their homes. Winger later accepted the role of Abby.

Music

The music-loving director Demme invited musicians to compose the score live on set, to support the film's storyline.
"For the longest time," Demme has said, "I've had this desire to provide the musical dimension of a movie without traditionally scored music. I thought: wait a minute; in the script, Paul is a music-industry bigwig, Sidney's a record producer, many of his friends will be gifted musicians, so of course there would be non-stop music at this gathering. We have music playing live throughout the weekend, but always in the next room, out on the porch or in the garden."
Throughout the unconventional filming and loosely staged scenes, a New York–based Middle Eastern ensemble, including Palestinian musician Zafer Tawil, and Iraqi Amir ElSaffar, who played the score of Demme's documentary Man from Plains, compose the score on set. Always present at the filming, the musicians had the freedom—and were encouraged—to play whenever they were inspired to, and to ignore the camera.
According to Demme on the DVD, during filming of a dramatic scene, Hathaway complained about the music interfering with the mood, to which Demme responded, "Tell her to do something about it!" Hathaway, in that scene, responded by improvising the line, "Can you tell them to knock it off?!" to which another actor not heavily involved in the scene went off-screen and told the band to stop.
Well-known actors mingle anonymously on-screen with musicians, artists, and dancers. Among them are the New Orleanian saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr., and the Brooklyn-based TV on the Radio's lead singer Tunde Adebimpe.
Singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock plays a wedding guest. At the ceremony Hitchcock, at the request of his old friend Demme, performs the song "America" from his 1982 album Groovy Decay. He also plays "Up To Our Nex." written for the movie. "It's my micro-encapsulation of the movie. The song is trying to be a voice in Kym's head." Filmed in one take at the wedding party, he is spontaneously joined by the hip-hop star Fab 5 Freddy, and the dancehall singers Sister Carol, ElSaffar and Tawil.
Hitchcock recalled,
For Demme, it was about creating evocative music in the moment.

Sound

Sound recording was a notable challenge in making Rachel Getting Married. Demme's documentary-inspired vision for the film — which consisted of long takes, multiple moving cameras, improvisation, and the live recording of music on set simultaneously with the dialog — made it difficult to record a wide range of sounds and to place and hide the necessary microphones. Sound mixer Jeff Pullman described his chosen approach as "miking this like an orchestra", with multitrack recording using up to 12 tracks.

Reception

Critical response

The film received critical acclaim and appeared on many "Best Film of 2008" lists.
Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune called the film "a triumph of ambience", and applauded the acting, declaring that "Hathaway, DeWitt, Irwin and especially Winger are working at a very high level" in the film. Roger Ebert's four-star rating added, "apart from the story, which is interesting enough, 'Rachel Getting Married' is like the theme music for an evolving new age." Other critics praised Jonathan Demme. Andrew Sarris noted in the New York Observer "his career of cinematic good works" and Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly observed "a fight scene that's as raw as Ingmar Bergman and as operatic as Mildred Pierce"... and "Demme's finest work since The Silence of the Lambs.
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone noted that Rachel Getting Married is "a home run... deep into the joy and pain of being human." A.O. Scott of The New York Times said that the film "has an undeniable and authentic vitality, an exuberance of spirit, that feels welcome and rare".
Many reviewers praised the film for its organic feel; Salon reviewer Stephanie Zacharek noted that "with 'Rachel Getting Married,' Demme has once again scaled back, making a picture that has some of the ease and warmth of his earlier movies, although it also feels stripped down and direct in a way that's new for Demme." USA Today proclaimed: "After a foray in documentary films, director Jonathan Demme has returned to narrative storytelling, assuming a decidedly cinéma vérité style that has echoes of Robert Altman. The film's greatest asset is the sense of cringing realism in portraying dinner parties and interpersonal encounters that can throw family members off-kilter." The Los Angeles Times noted:
Anne Hathaway won raves for her work as Kym. USA Today found her wonderful in the role and wrote "Her nervous laughter, edginess and quick temper blend convincingly with her need for attention and vulnerability." Newsweek commented: "Kym is a major pain in the ass, and Hathaway's raw, spiky performance makes no attempt to ingratiate. Yet she makes Kym's inner torment so palpable you can't help but feel for her, however insufferable she may be. It's a terrific performance...". Empire felt that "Kym is a peach of a role—she sleeps with the best man, fights with the maid of honor, quips, 'You're so thin, it's like you're Asian'—and Hathaway squeezes it for all the juice it's worth, making this raw-nerved, narcissistic Tasmanian Devil not just believable, but somehow likable."
Beyond general analysis, film scholars have also approached the film as a critical commentary on East Coast liberalism in Contemporary Cinema and Neoliberal Ideology.

Top ten lists

The film appeared on many critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2008.