Although Rachel Getting Married is directed by Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs), the only gore here is the open wound of familial dysfunction. Anne Hathaway plays Kym, the prodigal daughter returning from rehab for her older sister's wedding. As wedding preparations swirl around her, Kym struggles to regain the normalcy of life after addiction. Meanwhile, her family grapples with the reintroduction of their troubled daughter into their idyllic suburban microcosm.
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ely with a hand-held camera, Rachel Getting Married often feels like a documentary and borrows heavily from Thomas Vinterberg's The Celebration in both style and substance. Hathaway is superb; she turns Kym into a character who is simultaneously likable and abhorrent — her vulnerability is surpassed only by her narcissism. If the character has any genuine development at all during the film (which is debatable), we see it more in Hathaway's basset-hound eyes than in Kym's dialogue. Her sister Rachel (DeWitt) provides an interesting counterpoint in sibling rivalry, while their mother and father are caricatures of WASP-y Connecticut parents, living in perpetual denial of their family's foibles.
Generally, Rachel Getting Married is well written, directed and acted, but it lacks closure. The film ends much as it begins, perhaps to convey the message that, in life, nothing really changes. But the viewer is left with the nagging feeling that the past two hours have been spent watching a stranger's wedding video. While this may have been the point, it doesn't fully satisfy — the ride is good, but the experience fails to linger.
