Toronto Dispatch: Girl Fights and Family Secrets
You will get a chance to read more about Jonathan Demme‚s spectacular new feature, Rachel Getting Married, in this space soon enough. But I wanted to contribute my two cents now, because it is hard to overstate Demme’s achievement with this powerful narrative. Both melodramatic and, at times, so real it almost seems like a documentary, Rachel Getting Married stars Anne Hathaway as a neurotic recovering drug addict named Kim, who leaves rehab for the weekend to attend the marriage of her older sister (Rosemarie DeWitt). One of the few young mainstream actresses capable of conveying grounded personalities without letting glamor and make-up obstruct her performances, Hathaway does her best work as a destructive, frighteningly haunted young woman whose dark past involves her role in a terrible accident that drove the family apart. With the magnificent wedding set piece that closes the film and a somewhat unlikable lead female character, it’s easy to compare it with a movie from last year that shared those distinctive plot points, Noah Baumbach’s Margot At the Wedding. Unlike Margot, Rachel was rejected from this year’s New York Film Festival, but it’s far superior to Baumbach’s minimalistic drama. Demme’s last few films have been documentaries (including the Jimmy Carter portrait Man From Plains), and that skill comes into play here, as the director uses a technique reminiscent of Robert Altman by staging a large wedding event and finding the intimate story buried within it.
This is tragicomic family drama you can believe in, and for that it should be compared with Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration before even considering the similarities to Margo. Kim is the sort of gal nobody trusts anymore, somebody whose second and third chances to avoid the pratfalls of having an addictive personality dried up long ago. This tension keeps you on edge for the duration of the movie; it always seems like Kim is moments away from screwing up the party and losing touch with the only people who still care about her. That said, there is a sense of redemption, albeit a subtle one, when Kim faces off with her troubled mother, a woman living in denial of her responsibility for her daughter’s problems. That the two engage in an actual fist fight (uh, spoiler alert) testifies to the raw onscreen emotion, which makes you uncomfortable and utterly hooked at once.
Oddly enough, Rachel Getting Married isn’t the only film at the Toronto International Film Festival that involves a pretty nasty girl fight and an even nastier character named Rachel, although it is the superior one. Nothing But the Truth, a strangely uneven political drama from The Contender director Rod Lurie, stars Kate Beckinsale as a Washington, D.C. reporter loosely based on The New York Times journalist Judith Miller, who did jail time rather than reveal her anonymous source in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame (Vera Farmiga). Lurie’s story involves a bleaker outcome for both the Miller and Plame characters (here called Rachel — not to be confused with the one in Demme’s film — and Erika), and the strained melodrama eventually forces the entire situation into a kind of political pulp fiction. Alan Alda and an icy Matt Dillon nibble on the scenery as the legal advisers to the case, but Lurie fixates on the women in peril as if he were making a snuff film. They are constantly angry, vainly attempting to evade trouble from the authorities and almost never get the chance to smile.
It’s one thing that Truth is bleak, but another entirely that it continually lingers on Rachel’s discomfort. Her husband (David Schwimmer) talks down to her: “Whatever it is that’s keeping you in here is more important than what’s going on out there,” he shrugs, nonchalantly admitting to his extramarital affair. A few minutes later, we get a brutal scene where another prison inmate beats Beckinsale into a bloody sack of meat. It’s an engaging scene, but does it really serve the part of the story that’s important here? Where are the juicy details of Rachel’s trenchant muckraking finesse, the stuff that got her into the slammer in the first place? That’s where the real movie hides. When Lurie occasionally flashes back to Rachel’s investigation into the CIA agent story, the film grows slightly more enthralling, but these scenes are frequently interrupted by a focus on the brutality of prison life that serves little purpose outside of exploitative motives. Regardless, the combative women in Demme’s Rachel pack a better wallop.
