Jonathan Demme is an excellent director, perhaps best known for his "Silence of the Lambs". It's always exciting to see a new endeavor from a man with such an accomplished resumé but directors with even better resumés than Demme throw in a clunker every once in a while.
Make no mistake about the fact that "Rachel Getting Married" is a clunker of momentous proportions. It stops and starts and makes you either dislike or not care about its characters. That's fine if you really hate a character because that means that the actor you hate has done a good job. Feelings for the characters never rise to that level here. All you want them to do is get off the screen as soon as possible because what they are, more than anything else, is annoying. Some are annoying on purpose. Others are unintentionally so, which I suppose is even worse.
Kym (Anne Hathaway) is a twenty-something woman that is being released from a mental hospital. We learn that she is a terminal screw-up - with an attitude, no less. We realize immediately that beneath her hardened, wisecracking shell beats the heart of a damaged human being. It's not all that hard to discern since the same can be said for almost everyone.
She returns to her childhood home in the midst of her sister Rachel's (Rosemarie DeWitt) wedding. Everyone is descending upon the home, making it into a Grand Central Station of comings and goings - an ideal situation to walk into from a mental hospital, don't ya think?. Her father, Paul (Bill Irwin), is a nice guy but doesn't seem particularly bright (or stupid) and it's hard to know how to feel about him.
Kym is self-involved. If I could think of a stronger way to put this, I would write those words. While everything is swirling around the bride-to-be, Kym keeps making everything about her, to the point where you wish someone would just smack her and shut her up. Everyone in Kym's family seems a bit off but not terribly so. The groom's family however is comprised of perfect people, but not in a funny let's goof on them sort of way. They are just good people, seemingly without a single fault. It's simply nauseating.
Demme strings together scene after scene that fail to propel the plot. We watch people eat and tell bad jokes and laugh. Over and over. While mental illness and abuse of alcohol and drugs hang over everything, it is the audience that struggles with whether or not to commit suicide.
