Wedding Crusher

It really isn’t people like me who make a diff....

Actually, strike that – it is people like me who make a difference when it comes to building buzz around a movie, around a performance. I’ve already told you about Sally Hawkins and Happy-Go-Lucky and Kristin Scott Thomas in I’ve Loved You So Long, that these are actresses whose work you shouldn’t miss this season. Well, definitely add to the list Anne Hathaway and Rachel Getting Married. I knew Jonathan Demme’s exploration of a dysfunctional family gathering for a wedding was going to be something special months ago, and whaddya know, it is.

Hathaway, who has grown from Princess-y starlet into bona fide movie star before our eyes thanks to smartly chosen projects, stars in the film as Kym, a recovering addict who has been in and out of rehab for years.

Kym finally has found a treatment that works for her and is nine months sober when she’s given a weekend pass to attend her older sister Rachel’s wedding in Connecticut.

As you have probably guessed, this mix, this having the prodigal daughter coming home, is the source of the very-real, very-honest, very-raw conflict that makes this such a special occasion for everyone involved. And I mean “special” as in cathartic.

Hathaway still looks Bambi-eyed in Rachel Getting Married – how couldn’t she? – but the Bambi Jenny Lumet (daughter of director Sidney) has written is haunted.

It is beaten and flawed and hurt.

By tapping into that pain pays, Hathaway pays out in spades.

Kym is worlds apart from Rachel, who, played with award worthiness of her own by Rosemary DeWitt, is a study of the same qualities in measured quantities. Both actress and both characters complement each other richly.

The way Demme shot Rachel Getting Married puts us right in the action. The material from which he worked obviously was conducive to this: by making us part of it we get to experience the entire wedding weekend, we feel it, and we get to criticize it. We are there, not as intruders but rather as specters, if you will, looking through sorrow-colored glasses at the sadness of what is being revealed and the joy that is found in the moments that follow.

But both Lumet and Demme take it a step forward and let us into the characters. We are allowed not only to experience and feel and criticize them but we also are encouraged to get to know and respect and root for them.

That’s just dysfunction at its best, isn’t it?

My Rating ****

Photo: RottenTomatoes.com.