The Bends: Jonathan Demme's RACHEL GETTING MARRIED

 Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin, Debra Winger, Anna Deveare Smith. Dir. Jonathan Demme, Sony Pictures Classics, 2008

Any conversation held about New Hollywood's giants which does not include Jonathan Demme is not a complete conversation. That's your basic bold, declarative statement and I, No One in Particular, stand by it. 

I own, I think, four of Demme's movies. Not that many. I've seen most of the rest, though not CAGED HEAT and not BELOVED, but in every case, every picture knocks me out. Every picture feels like a master class in filmmaking in which the lecturer says nothing and lets the work speak for itself. I notice Demme's direction because I'm one of those guys, but you could have seen SOMETHING WILD, PHILADELPHIA, & SILENCE OF THE LAMBS back when, liked them all, and had no idea the same guy directed them. For some, that's sort of the kiss of death, I guess - they don't discuss a director like Demme because his pictures aren't about him in the way a Coppola or Scorsese film is, where even if the movie sounds weird the audience will see it for Scorsese's name and reputation. 

I'm sorry, I just took a long time to say Demme isn't a brand name filmmaker because he's perceived as having no brand. His movies leap across several stylistic maps. He doesn't only do quirky ensemble comedies, he directs concert docs, including the best concert movie ever made, STOP MAKING SENSE. He does modern horror movies. And courtroom dramas. And movies about meeting Howard Hughes in the desert and giving him a ride. Demme inverts the SESAME STREET ditty, "One of these things is not like the other." In Demme's ouvre none of these things is like another. Except they are. Demme enjoyed a diehard fanatic cult in life, and it persists in his absence. They KNOW Jonathan Demme. I admire the shit out of him because every one of his movies rivets me to its story and characters, even the Talking Heads movie, but they know everything I'm about to say. 

He hooks me early with something off kilter, something slightly out of the ordinary, and takes me into the lives and worlds of people I think I don't know, but do, and shows me they're familiar for good reason. I shy from terms such as humanist filmmaker, it makes me think of important and boring films that did well on Oscar night, but Demme's a humanist filmmaker and it's why his movies are so unforgettable, as disparate as they look in a list. 

Demme's 2008 ensemble drama, RACHEL GETTING MARRIED, which received no push from Sony Pictures Classics and died on the vine at Oscar time, garnering a lone nomination for Anne Hathaway as Best Actress, is one of the best movies I've seen this century. It may be one of the best movies I've ever seen. It's sort of a small, off brand title to say that about, but it hit me about as hard as anything I've seen in some time, qnd I watched THE SILENT PARTNER and JEREMY just last week. RACHEL GETTING MARRIED equals either of those. At least.

I can't write this and not mention that I posted a piece two days ago whining I couldn't watch RACHEL because it reminded me too much of my own life. It still does. In the movie, Anne Hathaway's Kym, out on pass from rehab to attend her sister, Rachel's wedding, struggles - and fails, for varying reasons - to not make family moments and relationships all about herself. I'd like to succeed at that in this writeup, but have to say upfront that RACHEL GETTING MARRIED hit me today as ORDINARY PEOPLE did when I saw it in 1981. 

I'm not in any way comparing the two. The relationship between Timothy Hutton and both Mary Tyler Moore and Donald Sutherland mirrored mine to both my parents. We lived in the same world. I swam in high school and quit after running away, rather than a suicide attempt. When I watch ORDINARY PEOPLE, I see a movie so personal to me I know I'm incapable of discussing it objectively. A lot of people don't like the movie, Robert Redford's first as director, and they make excellent arguments, and I don't care. The movie is celluloid catharsis. It's like ROCKY HORROR or my love of the Grateful Dead - I have no objective distance and want none.

RACHEL GETTING MARRIED may be another like that. It feels like it, now. I know that family. Not its specifics, but I know those interactions, those strained relationships, those tones of voice, those tantrum moments which will replay in my head for eternity. I went to a funeral on pass from rehab, not a wedding, but I feel a direct kinship to these characters and this story. 

Treatment centers do tend to urge clients to make amends to family independent of what 12 Step groups suggest, and the results, which I have experienced firsthand, often look like they do here. I don't share the severity of these character's trauma, but I've been to this gathering and I've been a version of Kym and my brother and I have done the dances Kym does with Rachel. It's a complete fucking mess, and Bob Evans, of all people, comes to mind. 

'There's three sides to every story: Your side, my side, and the truth. And no one's lying" 

Evans said that in characterizing Hollywood, which in his era had been and was transitioning from being a family business and which still operated according to dysfunctional family rules. Coming from a dysfunctional family myself, Bob Evans' words carry the ring of gospel. The Buchman family in RACHEL GETTING MARRIED bears them out, as well. 

Rachel's right, her family's right, and the truth is they're all right and all wrong because no one's lying, it's family, and family is a goddamn mess. 400 miles away, not going home often, it's still a mess. My brother's right, my Mom's right, and I'm right. None of us is lying.

The thing is, I still want to discuss RACHEL GETTING MARRIED in an objective way, because even as I had a personal and intimate experience with the story, I'm still enough a movie-guy to know I saw an incredibly assured, precise, deliberate piece of filmmaking craft which looked and felt like improv and documentary. Demme has an off the cuff brilliance. We watch the handheld jittercam angles and the way the movie and the story sort of go wandering around looking at stuff rather than being laser focussed on this character in that specific, frozen moment. We don't watch, or think about, the deliberate choices made to show us what we're sucked into, don't think how none of these images, none of these moments and encounters, is unplanned and unrehearsed. 

Demme makes movies as the Old Master himself, John Ford, made them. His rehearsal dinner and wedding scenes work exactly as the wedding reception in Cimino's THE DEER HUNTER or the officers' balls in Ford's FORT APACHE, drawing us into the family, its members and their official and unofficial roles, its rules, written and not, & its relationships, investing us so firmly in the family and their world that we'll go anywhere the filmmaker wants to take us. 

We'll forgive the characters just about anything, because Ford and Cimino and Demme make them real, breathing people, people we know even if they don't look like us. People we like and dislike at once. People we understand, perhaps most when they're least likable.

That's why I love Jonathan Demme. He makes films which resonate with people, which speak to them intimately, which feel like someone read their journal, and yet which work as classic filmmaking, which can be appreciated simply for the quiet display of auteur-level technique he brings to projects even when the particular story doesn't move us. It took me a couple viewings to really empathize with Starling in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, for whatever reason, but I never doubted I saw a great freakin' movie. Demme's movies always work at many different levels at once and all of them are at least interesting.

All this talk and no mention of the actors who made me feel the characters as I did. Demme's one of the Masters, and I see it in Bill Irwin as Paul Buchman, the paterfamilias who appears to be like the classic liberal - able to see every side and thus none at all. For a good deal of the movie, I saw Irwin as this well-meaning but clueless father who tries to see the best in everyone and keep the peace and be cool-Dad to everyone and ultimately seems a little out of it. 

Then, in one moment, Irwin's Buchman comes across a plate in a stack in the kitchen. We know as soon as he knows - it's one of those plates kids make in daycamp that get rotated into the daily-usage dishes. My brother and I both made them. Buchman's dead son, Nathan, made it. Irwin sees the plate and crumples. 

The clueless nice-guy vanishes and we see the father of a dead son who lives with the daughter who inadvertently killed him, and survived. His goodnatured blankness stands revealed as the way he has chosen to deal with his grief in order to continue as a dad and as a man. Irwin tells the whole story in the first grimace. The rest of his wordless implosion reinforces it. 

I know Irwin mostly as a clown, creator of clowning-reflective shows like FOOL MOON and OLD HATS, as a brilliant body actor, and from his two episodes on NORTHERN EXPOSURE. Watching him in RACHEL GETTING MARRIED, I first thought Bill Irwin could be the best actor of his generation, a DeNero or Hoffman, if he wanted to. After awhile I thought, no, Irwin IS that level, but he invests it in other work. Which moviegoers don't see.

Moviegoers see, or did, plenty of Anne Hathaway, particularly in the Aughts, when she's almost ubiquitous. I get a sense that Hathaway is one of those people portions of the internet love to despise, like if I mention her name someone will pop up and say, "DIDN'T YOU KNOW ANNE HATHAWAY WAS FILMED EATING PARTS OF LIVE PYGMY BABIES IN SWAZILAND IN 2007 AND FOUNDED AN NGO TO PROMOTE PYGMY CANNIBALISM???" 

If, in fact, she is one of those people, sorry but I always like her in movies. When I went to a Jesuit high school in Cincinnati, one of our sister schools was St. Ursula Academy. Many St. Ursula girls came from Old Cincinnati families. Many were gorgeous. What every Ursula girl had in common, however, was being crazy smart. Smart, cool girls went to Ursula, the kind of girls not raised to hide their intelligence in front of boys, but to take us on and win. Hathaway feels, regardless of role, like she's speaking from that place, and I always start out her movies inclined to like her.

In RACHEL'S GETTING MARRIED, I may have found Hathaway's acme, at least in my contemplation of her career. Hathaway plays Kym Buchman as if she lived her life and knew it, or lived mine. Kym makes moments about herself. She doesn't know she's doing it even though she knows from years of mental hospitals and rehabs that she does it, that self centeredness is central to her nature. She doesn't want to be how she is, but she doesn't know how to be anything else. She doesn't go through life following a script that says, "Step on sister's moment with your melodrama HERE," though many at the wedding and in her life, particularly Rachel, do. All of Kym's stories have three sides, her side is two of them, and yet she isn't lying. She is not evil. She isn't a schemer, a master puppeteer. She's not a type. She's a real person, someone I've smoked with outside a ton of meetings. Someone I understand when I hear her share. Someone I've been, in certain ways.

Hathaway nails all of Kym, all of that person. The ferocious intelligence, the vibrant warmth, the bewilderment, the pain that never goes away, and the feeling if she starts screaming she'll never be able to stop. If this is not Hathaway's best work it lives in a guesthouse out back of her best. She earned her Oscar nomination. It's a shame Sony Pictures Classics didn't see enough in it to give her a push.

Which brings me back to Jonathan Demme, not even recognized with a nomination that Oscar night. Hathaway and Irwin give their performances because they've got a Demme supporting them. Everything about Irwin's affable blindness communicated itself in his first minutes onscreen. He introduces himself to Kym's treatment counselor, is reminded they met two weeks ago, and sails right on, happy and pleased and everything's great, tra la. He says almost nothing and we know who Irwin is. 

Hathaway doesn't ever have to say she's self centered even when she doesn't like herself. Her first remarks to her dad, reproving him for tardiness in picking her up, the moody way she stares offscreen, the way she smokes tell us. Irwin and Hathaway and the rest of the cast know less is more with Demme, that he'll be there to let them show us their character without five pages of exposition.

Which brings me back to the rehearsal dinner and wedding/reception scenes. Huge, long scenes, they form this film's heart and vital organs, as the wedding & reception scenes in THE DEER HUNTER do. Novice or more casual filmgoers may stumble in these scenes, wondering why Demme shows us the rehearsal dinner talent show and its many participants, the officiant teaching the guests to chant "Rachel! Sidney!", all the toasts at the wedding, not just one great one and Kym's wildly inappropriate and mistimed 9th step. 

Most movies, and most directors, could cut through this material in five-six shots and a third as much dialogue. Based on current filmmaking, it's not unreasonable to watch RACHEL GETTING MARRIED and think that way.

Demme could also cut to the heart of these long sequences and deliver it all, tied with a bow, in a few minutes. He told us all we needed to know about Paul and Kym in three minutes of facial expression and throway dialogue. Demme goes long in these scenes because the movie isn't about Kym coming home from treatment, it's about Rachel, who's getting married, and about her family, which is trying not to unravel and to be present for Rachel and yet deal with Kym, and an ex-wife who appears to want to be an ex-mom. Yet Debra Winger's Abby Buchman has experienced irrevocable loss within the family, too, and Demme doesn't let us villify or scapegoat her. Her withdrawal is as much her response to loss as Bill Irwin's present absence, the way he's handsy with all yet seems to know none of them.

I fear I make RACHEL GETTING MARRIED sound like a grim slog, and that it isn't also attests to Demme's power. The wedding and rehearsal scenes, the handheld camera work, the overlapping dialogue and verite sensibility show a loving, living extended family full of music and culture without looking like PBS. As ever, Demme populates the film with working musicians and figures from the YO! MTV RAPS world of his cousin and co-creator of YMR, Ted Demme. (Robin Hitchcock, about whom Demme made STOREFRONT HITCHCOCK, shows up as a wedding singer.) 

It's a comfortable movie, a story dressed in old courds and a baggy sweater, confident of its power to enthrall without fancy duds or cool steadicam moves. It's a work of utter genius, a filmmaker at the height of his powers making the height of his powers seem almost an afterthought. Demme made documentaries about Neil Young and about Jimmy Carter right before and another doc about Young right after RACHEL GETTING MARRIED. It's as if, in the midst of a string of passion projects, Demme shrugged, "Oh yeah, I also make features," and went back to rock'n'roll.

That shrug, this movie, is a minor masterpiece, a career-summation in a career including MELVIN&HOWARD, SOMETHING WILD, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and, oh yeah, STOP MAKING SENSE, the best concert film of all time. It's also a relatively obscure entry on that list, which is/ought to be inconceivable. 

Jonathan Demme was seldom better than RACHEL GETTING MARRIED and everyone should know. It's not a film to forget and rediscover, like JEREMY. It's a film to champion now, and tomorrow, and whenever discussions of great goddamn movies arise. It is, like its director, a litmus test of sorts. 

A conversation about the giants of New Hollywood cannot be complete without discussing Jonathan Demme. A discussion of those filmmakers' great works cannot be complete without discussing RACHEL GETTING MARRIED.