The wattage of Anne Hathaway's star power is rare in contemporary Hollywood and the brightness may reside principally in those Judy Garland eyes, which seem two sizes too big for her face. But her poise has always been as striking as her appearance.
In Rachel Getting Married, Hathaway pushes her considerable talents into a darker, more destructive zone. She's not Rachel nor is she getting hitched. Hathaway plays Kym, a slouchy twentysomething released from rehab to attend the marriage of her older sister Rachel. With her face gone sickly pale and her fingers continually grappling with cigarettes, Kym is a calamity waiting to happen, the bull in the wedding boutique. She knows it and so does everyone in the family.
Directed by Jonathan Demme, Rachel Getting Married resembles his recent documentaries (Jimmy Carter Manfrom Plains) more than his polished Hollywood movies (Philadelphia). Filmed in natural light, it resembles a well-thought-out home movie as the hand held camera trails Kym into her father's rambling Victorian home in the Connecticut countryside, following with odd edits as she climbs the stairs to Rachel's room.
The sisterly bonds are frayed and threaten to unravel entirely before the end of the long weekend. Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) is smart and self-possessed, a psychology major who has run out of patience with her sister's psychological problems. This is supposed to be Rachel's weekend but Kym demands to be the center of attention, thrusting her struggle with addiction into the forefront and overstepping social boundaries in a feverish enactment of the 12-Step program's dictate of forthrightness. Only Kym isn't entirely forthright, rewriting reality for drama's sake, even inventing stories of a pedophile uncle to gain attention.
Expressive as always, Hathaway remains fetching at those moments when she isn't digging deeper into Kym's wounds or lashing out resentfully at her family (or is it at herself?), a clan with many hairline fractures and open breaks. Rachel Getting Married is a platform for Hathaway (whispers of an Oscar nomination are heard), a psychologically perceptive family drama and an eye-opening look into upper middle class America circa 2008-a family that hires Robyn Hitchcock as the wedding singer, serves East Indian food at the rehearsal dinner and dwells in a house full of multi-culti bric-a-brac. Rachel's fiancé is an African American of solid middle class foundations, their union a testimony to a class system based less and less on heritage and increasingly on taste and the budget to afford the signifiers of taste. When a disoriented Kym roars off the road and into a tree stump, she's driving a Mercedes-Benz, not a Ford Escort.
