Some movies are not easy to watch. You get so involved by them that sometimes you feel sorry, guilty or embarrassed by the characters. You actually experience the movie more than simply watch it.
Something like that happened to me with Rachel Getting Married, a movie that did not stay long in the theaters but that I am sure it is certain to be huge in the DVD market. Rachel is one of the daughters of an upper class family and her sister Kym —the main character played by Anne Hathaway— is a repentant junkie who just came out of rehab on the eve of her wedding.
In Rachel... the hand-held camera used throughout the movie provides a documentary feeling that is, at times, painful to watch, as if you were watching an accident about to happen. I have no words to describe Hathaway’s performance. She is astounding. What a difference with the naïve girl from The Devil Wears Prada. In fact, in that movie I was more impressed by her looks than by her acting. What a moron.
In Rachel Getting Married, her tortured, disturbed character looks so real that you wonder how easy or how hard it must have been to perform it. No doubt she is a wonderful actress and, to pull a task of this magnitude, a human being with great depth and understanding. Is the rest of the movie at the same level? Yes… mostly.
The wedding is almost a living postcard of multiracial, post-modern perfection with world music instead of Vienna waltzes. Everyone here is an interesting, wholesome and sensitive human being, which is nice but not very realistic (unless that you live in Utah --as the character of Nicholas Cage says in the final scene of Raising Arizona).
But maybe the only thing that might be a bit uncomfortable is the length of the celebration and the insistence of Jonathan Demme in showing so many details of the spirited party that don’t help the story at all.
At the end, though, who cares about the hangover if you have spent the night with Anne Hathaway?
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