Rachel Getting Married

Here’s a checklist for ten things you’re guaranteed to see in any dysfunctional-family film:

1. An annoying child, or children, of any either gender.
2. A strange and quirky father or father figure.
3. Divorced parents.
4. A self-proclaimed “outcast” or “misunderstood” character.
5. Long, whining passages of dialogue; or monologue by any of the above character types describing how bad their life, or the world is.
6. Lots of booze, or at least one character who is boozed up.
7. Lots of arguing, which eventually lead to a character or preferably characters crying.
8. Easy-to-digest, ‘it’s all okay at the end’ narratives.
9. A death or some kind of injury.
10. The feeling that at the end you’ve just been patronised.

Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married is no exception to this whatsoever.

The film has an easy-to-follow, digestible narrative that is so ridiculously tame and condescending that by the time you’re walking home, you’re so safe in the knowledge that everything’s going to be okay, it feels like you’ve not actually seen a drama film, but rather a bed-time story.

The film follows the story of Kym who’s just got out of rehab and is spending the weekend back at her family home for her sister’s wedding, pretty ordinary so far, eh? The film opens on Kym (who’s name is also quirkily spelt, just like her quirky self) sitting on a bench waiting to be picked up by her father. We see her with a thick layer of black eyeliner and ‘eff-me haircut’; she then takes a drag from a cigarette. After this was over, I thought I was watching teenagers down at the local park and then realised I was in the cinema. Anyway, back to the film.

As with any normal wedding, the house is an epicentre of mayhem, there are characters of all walks of life doing all manner of normal, wedding-based activities. Then suddenly we see Rachel trying on her wedding dress (did I mention there was a wedding happening because so far I haven’t seen or heard it mentioned in the film itself so far) and as those girls tend to do, as soon as she sees Kym, she goes insane: screaming, jumping up and down and rolling around. At least that’s how I would imagine girls act when they see each other, I can’t be certain of that. There’s then more embarrassing dialogue as the two reminisce over a fantasy that one of them had when they were little, I can’t remember which one it was exactly because they kept talking over each other at the top of their voices in stereotypical, nails-on-a-chalkboard voices and as soon as that happens I can’t understand a word that is being spoken.

The film’s true embarrassments come in two scenes, the first happens around ten minutes later and lasts what feels to be about forty minutes, but is more realistically about fifteen. I’m talking of course, about the toasting scene. This is potentially one of the most disposable scenes ever; the only thing that compares to it is the dancing scene which happens later. The toasting however, introduces many characters which do not motivate or shape the narrative or plot, but rather slow it down. Valuable screen time is therefore wasted and which could have been spent developing the psyche of the principal characters and would have made it much more gutsy and daring and ultimately a much more interesting film, but instead we’re subjected to stories about how the friends of the couple-to-be met them and how much they love them. Although sweet and occasionally comical, they add nothing, literally nothing. All that happens in this scene that is remotely interesting is Kym makes a tit out of herself in front of the family, which leads to another argument. The argument of course it full of half-baked psychological nonsense, which comes from Kym and Rachel. Rachel, by the way is conveniently studying for her PhD in psychology. Very well placed, don’t you think?

Conversely though, you have to give it to Rachel Getting Married for using scenes such as this and also the dishwasher-loading competition scene, as they do add nothing and to script scenes where nothing happens and we learn nothing about characters, instead opting for observational scenes, is quite daring and it is a bold choice because you run the risk of boring your audience. However, it doesn’t use them in this way and it doesn’t exploit this potential and just as it begins to break a taboo or just as it is about to do something interesting, it creeps back in its shell and returns to another boring conventional plot device.

I also felt that to explicitly explain what had happened to their brother was another soft-option. The scariest thing about an audience is their imagination: if you tease them or dangle the notion of something horrible or gripping or even violent in front of them and then leave it to their imagination then what they think they saw or what they think happens is far worse then anything that you could ever show or explain to them. This is not that I approve or find the accidental drowning of your bother acceptable or on any level decent, but rather that if they had left it simply that he was dead of unknown and unspeakable circumstances then my imagination can run wild. The last thing that a drama should be is patronising and spoon-feeding and sadly that is the case with Rachel Getting Married. The film has wonderful potential, but unfortunately none of the guts.