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14 / 03 / 2010
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Reviews:
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Rachel Getting Married

Rachel Getting Married

Cast: Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin, Debra Winger, Mather Zickel.

Directed by Jonathan Demme.

Story: Recovering drug addict maid of honour.

Running Time: 1hr 53 minutes.

UK certificate 15, US certificate R.

 

Another well-put-together movie that suffers from being ... well, insufferable.

The Princess Diaries seems like a long, long time ago to Anne Hathaway. I'm not like other reviewers. To me, a movie can be cheap and trashy and still get a high rating because it's great fun to watch, whereas the next film can be the most finely crafted piece of work since the Sistine Chapel's ceiling and bomb. Hence The Dukes of Hazzard scores far higher than Revolutionary Road despite the obvious disparities. I'm not interested in how good a movie is, only how enjoyable it is to watch. I'll watch reruns of Father Ted any day rather than a stunningly brilliant and stark documentary on the realities of the Holocaust.

And so it is with Rachel Getting Married. I can recognise Anne Hathaway's fine, Oscar-nominated turn as the reforming drug addict with the tragic past that tore the family apart. I can acknowledge the realism created by the intentionally jumbly dialogue, unintrusive direction and fly-on-the-wall cinematographic style (which, incidentally, is a million times more effective than The Wrestler, which tried the same thing). I even like the title, which is nicely Debra Winger wistfully remembers when she had boobs as pert as Anne Hathaway and Rosemarie DeWitt. inventive and bucks the trend of uninspired titles beginning with "The" (which is a bugbear I will be airing some day soon when I run out of hot air). It is not, however, in any way or by any stretch of the imagination, an enjoyable movie. Even if you can tolerate Anne Hathaway's galactically annoying whine (think Ellen Page in Juno), even if the bilious fog of dinner-party pretentiousness doesn't make you nauseous, even if you actually have a family like this, full of people who snap each other's heads off as a form of sport, you surely can't enjoy watching them suffer. It can work if you temper it properly (Crash, American Beauty, even Schindler's List to a certain extent), but if you just throw pain at the screen and let it drip off, you're going to make your audience feel like shit. Even the eponymous wedding, happy moment though it was, only gave a brief respite between bouts of supposedly loving family members being horrible to each other. Why would I want to watch that?

Having said all that, if you've actually been through anything like drug addiction or the accidental death of a child, I can see how it could be cathartic to see others trying and failing to deal with the same issues. However, thanks to Rachel Getting Married, I now have a knot in my stomach the size of a watermelon and it's going to take an entire afternoon of Men Behaving Badly videos to get rid of it.

I enjoyed this film: 1/5

I think the average moviegoer will enjoy it: 2/5

Testosterone Satisfaction Rating: 0/5 - we nearly, but not quite, see Anne Hathaway's boob in the bath. That might have been enough to lift it to a 2/5...

To enjoy this film: identify with the addiction theme.

 

Rachel Getting Married was released in the UK on 23rd January 2009.