Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Pictures
of Kym
(Rachel Getting Married, 11/17/08)
By Nicholas Nicastro
Anne
Hathaway is not conventionally beautiful. Like the prototypical sad
clown, all of her features, from those big liquid eyes to her ample
lips, seem oversized for her face. What Michael Phelps is to swimming,
Hathaway is to facial expression: she has an unfair advantage, because
her endowments are so much richer than those of ordinary mortals. Add
that to her obvious intelligence and a talent that becomes more manifest
every year, and she may well become one of her generation's most formidable
actresses—the 21st century's Bette Davis.
None of this could have been predicted
from her early roles, from the adolescent puffery of Ella Enchanted
and The Princess Diaries (parts 1 and 2!), to last year's much-seen
disaster Get Smart . In Brokeback Mountain she was just
bitchy; Becoming Jane began to showcase her, but Austen-land
is still nothing more than a small, prestigious ghetto. In a real sense,
then, Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married is her real dramatic
debut.
Hathaway plays Kym, a former teen
model who's been in and out of drug rehab for the better part of a decade.
She's out again just in time to see her sister Rachel (Mad Men's
Rosemarie DeWitt) marry her musician boyfriend (Tunde Adebimpe). Kym,
who has not gotten over the tragedy that landed her in rehab in the
first place, becomes the catalyst for a raft of psychological dramas
that threaten to tear her comfortable Connecticut family apart. The
perfect-seeming Rachel is actually carrying around a load of sibling
resentment against her attention-starved sister; Dad (Bill Irwin) still
holds Kym as his favorite, but doesn't trust her a bit, and relations
with her divorced mother (Debra Winger) are unresolved at best. None
of this bodes well for a routine Thanksgiving meal at home, much less
a wedding.
For the most part, what unfolds
is poignant, enthralling, and rings true. As played by Hathaway, Kym
is a compelling mess—the kind of person who can't help being the
center of attention, but now suspects her center cannot hold. Screenwriter
Jenny Lumet (daughter of director Sidney) has created a character that
is infuriating, defensive, and petty, but also irresistible in her vulnerability.
Like so many people struggling with addiction, Kym deserves to be hugged
and slugged.
All this would have been compelling
enough to sustain the film. Indeed, the script almost seems to cry out
for a stripped down, Ordinary People-like approach, featuring
only its terrific cast and the fading New England light. Unfortunately,
director Demme (Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia) almost
ruins everything by injecting great honking dollops of gratuitous hipness.
For some reason, he opts for a twitchy hand-held camera that screams
"intimate domestic drama" when it could be mistaken for nothing
else. I usually have a high tolerance for this kind of thing, but when
Hathaway or Winger are emoting, the last thing we need is for the camera
to rock 'n roll just for art's sake.
Speaking of rock 'n roll, while
we are all eternally grateful that Demme gave us Stop Making Sense,
not every one of his productions need be a musicological feast. Lumet's
script is set among educated, upper middle-class folks in Connecticut
who are equally comfortable with kabbalah, saag paneer, and Barack Obama.
Demme's version of this is not just a Connecticut wedding, but one of
those old-time pan-racial, pan-ethnic, cross-cultural reggae-rock-jazz-folk-hip-hop
Indian-Haitian-African-themed Connecticut weddings. (I half-expected
Rachel and Sidney to be married under a chuppah). True, there
probably are people like this around, who think getting wed in an Indian
sari to the sound of Scottish bagpipes is sophisticated. But somebody—maybe
somebody like Hathaway's Rachel—should tell them that cribbing
indiscriminately from any tradition, each out of their individual contexts,
is patronizing and meaningless.
In short, this is a film better
than the sum of its parts. While Demme's act is getting thin, Hathaway's
is, hopefully, just beginning.
©2008 Nicholas Nicastro
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