In the Flesh: Rachel Getting Married

“All of you people living in this little world of judgement and paranoia and mistrust,” rants Kym Buchman (Anne Hathaway) to her family. “I can feel it every second.” It’s a statement made with a staggering lack of self-awareness, but that’s the Buchman clan’s stock in trade, whether it’s Kym’s hair-trigger hostility, her sister Rachel’s (Rosemary DeWitt) exhausted uptightness, or their father Paul’s (Bill Irwin) squishy helicopter parent enabling.These people can’t know themselves, they can only arrange and rearrange their squalid, hideous shared past like Paul’s goofily charming dishwasher loading competition with Rachel’s fiance, Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe), which ends with the accidental unearthing of the plastic childhood plate of Rachel and Kym’s late brother, Ethan. Ethan died young, drowned in his carseat after an intoxicated Kym drove the family car off a bridge, and twenty years later the family is still orbiting the gravity well of that single horrible moment. Everything comes back around to it, drawn in and crushed down into its infinitely dense mass.

A similar principle accounts for these people being around each other at all in the first place. Rachel remarks on it with poignant insight during a family fight. “It was lonely,” she says to Kym. “With everyone gone into your awful little world.” None of these people are capable of admitting that they haven’t moved on from Ethan’s death, that they all with varying shades of justification blame and resent one another for the actions leading up to it and taken in its wake. Kym and Rachel’s mother, Abby (Debra Winger), so clearly feels unbearable hatred and disgust toward Kym that it’s physically painful to watch Rachel try to force them into reconciliation in the wedding’s aftermath, hugging them tight as they stand stiffly apart, Abby visibly enraged, Kym desperate and upset. The ritual of the wedding, far from helping these people process their loss, serves to reaffirm its central place in their lives, first as an excuse to scream at one another without even the pretense of decorum, then to do exactly what Rachel correctly accuses Kym of doing with her godawful Twelve Steps maid of honor toast: pay lip service to reconciliation while offering nothing but an appeal to sentiment.

Director Jonathan Demme shoots the whole thing like he’s a frantic bystander, peering over shoulders, pushing up too close to hyperventilating characters, leaving the family’s many deluded solipsists and marriage-obsessed oddballs isolated center frame as they verbally self-immolate. Sidney’s mother’s (Carol Jean Lewis) earnest but faintly fanatical contention that her son’s rehearsal dinner is practice for both families existing together forever in heaven is particularly disturbing, an unthinking exaltation of banal rituals as hollow as the saris and Hindu cultural motifs Sidney and Rachel appropriate for their ceremony. Watching each character surrender to the weight and inertia of the wedding in turn is like a kind of sentimental slasher sequence, and when it carries through into the heartfelt goodbye between Rachel and Kym as the latter returns to rehab, hitching a ride with the clinician with whom she had an illicit affair on the inside, the impact is sickening. “I love your baby,” Kym tearfully tells the pregnant Rachel. That and four bucks will get you a cup of coffee.