Rachael Getting Married Review
This is one pretty confrontational chick flick. Well at least on the surface it is. Truth be known, it’s a bit more than that. Rachael Getting Married entwines addiction, grief and the joy of a wedding all in one.
Yup Anne Hathaway plays a recovering junkie that shows up for her sister’s wedding and somehow uses her personal problems to disrupt everything. It doesn’t help that her sister is a psychiatrist! So the sibling rivalry goes off from the get go. The movie is basically set around the sister’s wedding from the setting up of the marquee in the backyard, to the dismantling of it.
Rachael Getting Married is more interesting in how its put together than its synopsis. There are so many brilliant plot devices. Straight off the bat, Hathaway’s character Kim is picked up by her family in this really old Mercedes station wagon. Instantly you’re wondering why this well to do upstate New York (well Connecticut) family drive such an old car. Something is not quite right.
For virtually the whole movie, live music is playing. It’s meant to be the wedding band, which are a multi cultural rag-tag bunch of musos. But it brings a really arty feel to the whole thing as every scene has the dulcet pluckings of a violin in the back ground. And there are these weird antipodes everywhere, like Rachael is a white girl marrying a black guy and all these different kinds of music playing. The Indian theme of the wedding. It’s all very quirky.
In the true tradition of art house American cinema, this movie is virtually all filmed on location in a house with genuine shaky hand held looking cameras. The lighting is very organic which gives it a really edgy feel as well, especially in some of Hathaway’s more poignant scenes.
In summary this movie is not really a chick flick. There’s a big wedding with nearly no bridezilla moments. Simply the past coming back up embodied by Hathaway in such a way that the family has to move on from their tragedy before the joy of the wedding can take place. Saying any more than that might spoil it. But a movie well worth checking out nonetheless.
Posted: March 9th, 2009 under Movie Reviews.
