Rachel Getting Married

Directed by: Jonathan Demme
Written by: Jenny Lumet
Full credits from IMDb

These last five years, director Jonathan Demme has divided his time behind the camera between star-driven Hollywood vehicles—like The Truth About Charlie—and lefty documentaries, like Jimmy Carter: The Man from Plains. In his latest film, Rachel Getting Married, he combines the two styles of filmmaking, fusing the star-driven narrative fiction film with the vérité approach of on-the-ground non-fiction. The titular Rachel is not the only one tying the knot here—so are two aesthetics.

Unfortunately, American directors don’t make true-to-life movies like this often enough. A reliance on predictability and broad archetypes has come to define the country’s cinema, particularly, as of late, its independent sector. Countless recent films, like Diminished Capacity, Expired and Henry Poole is Here, are ostensibly quirky, but their characters are flat and their narratives are tied up neatly—and unnaturally. They don’t challenge audiences, in any meaningful ways, to reassess their lives or their movies. They simply conform to their expectations.

Rachel Getting Married, in contrast, is a refreshing, confounding and invigorating injection of the authentic. It’s not quirky; it’s down-and-dirty. Demme rejects the usual indie clichés in exchange for something more ambiguous and therefore more honest. He offers the audience little in terms of backstory or resolution; most of that is merely implied, through action and tossed-off dialogue, pushing the audience to confront not only its feelings about the American family but also about the artificiality of Tinseltown storytelling.

Kym (a type-defying Anne Hathaway) takes a leave of absence from rehab to attend her sister Rachel’s wedding at their childhood home in Connecticut. Set over the course of three days, the film covers the preparations, the rehearsal dinner, the ceremony and the morning after while the characters parcel out harbored resentments like early and unasked for Christmas presents. Kym and Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) do much of the battling, though the rest of the family gets in on it too, from the flamboyantly non-confrontational father (Bill Irwin) to the emotionally distant mother (Debra Winger). Both parents get a Big Acting Moment: when Irwin, forced to confront a past tragedy, sobs, flitting his hands to shoo away would-be consolers like gnats, his clowning background—he graduated, literally, from clown college—gives him the litheness to accentuate perfectly his character’s histrionics. In a late scene, Winger takes a smack from Hathaway before returning it with such brutality that it stands as one of the year’s most emotionally ferocious moments of film violence.

Demme follows the conventions of realistic moviemaking: he shoots the bantering, bickering and bitch-slapping with a shaky handheld camera, using jump cuts and unsteady close-ups to enhance the performers’ emotional intimacy. And he lets the musical score emerge organically from the action. Over the opening credits, we hear a group of musicians practice “Here Comes the Bride.” In a more typical, destined-for-TBS flick, we might have heard the tune played straight through. But here, the musicians clunk their instruments, begin the piece, stop and start again. By opening the film with a crude rehearsal, Demme signals that what’s to follow will be just as unpolished.

In fact, Rachel Getting Married’s director and actors don’t even seem to be working from a script. That’s less a criticism of Jenny Lumet’s screenplay than a testament to the naturalness of the direction and the authenticity of the actors. The film feels like a documentary about real members of a real wedding party. (A lengthy sequence of music and dancing following the wedding, likely not part of the script, is one of the film’s several home-movie-like interludes that wallow blissfully in observation.) The script offers little backstory for any character except Hathaway, but the actors seemed to have worked it out for themselves. The simplicity of the plot gives them plenty of space to experiment, which in turn gives the film an aura of improvisation. The actors talk over each other, finish each other’s sentences, and allude vaguely to personal history without elaboration—just as a real family would. It’s so lived-in that the ups-and-downs of the characters become the audience’s own. If a filmmaker is owed a debt of inspiration here, it’s not the screenwriter’s father, Sidney. It’s Robert Altman. (Indeed, he gets a “special thanks” in the end credits.)

Behind the domestic drama, Demme constructs a celebration of multiculturalism, the promise of liberalism in action. Rachel’s husband (TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe) and his family are African-American, which Demme doesn’t acknowledge, as though unremarkable; the wedding’s theme, in food and dress, is Indian; and the music runs the gamut from English folk to bebop sax. When the wedding cake is cut, it’s by the whole family, a mound of stacked, black-on-white hands that functions as the defining image of the movie’s message of togetherness—not just of multiracial harmony but of family unity.

For all its hostility and shared tragedies, the central characters in Rachel Getting Married are still a family. Fissures are exposed and exacerbated but ultimately set aside, avoiding the sitcom’s impulse for resolution. In the middle of a heated argument, Rachel reveals she’s pregnant and the fight quickly turns into celebration because, for the filmmakers, family’s the worst but it’s also the best. There’s neither forgiveness nor lack of forgiveness, suggesting that when it comes to our kinsfolk, we’re stuck with each other—so love the one you’re with.
During a toast to the bride and groom to be, the groom’s mother notes that this wedding, with families and friends of all races together and celebrating, must be what Heaven’s like. That pan-racial revelry might be the film’s most naïve element, but the credibility with which Demme executes it makes colorblind solidarity seem not only possible but actual. Grade: A


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Synecdoche, New York

Written & Directed by: Charlie Kaufman
Full credits from IMDb

I was depressed for several days after seeing Synecdoche, New York. Not because it’s a singularly depressing film—it’s sometimes funny and poignant, in addition to depressing—but because most other movies (except maybe Inland Empire or Last Year at Marienbad) seem so insignificant and irrelevant now. As does writing about them. That’s not to say that Synecdoche (rhymes with Schenectady) is the pinnacle of cinema, but that it’s an unparalleled, epic expression of one man’s neuroses. No other film, no other piece of art, has mined an artist’s conscious, subconscious and unconscious minds so thoroughly, so honestly, so awesomely. It’s endlessly enthralling, intellectually radical moviemaking and a benchmark in art-as-publicized-therapy.

Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Kaufman’s surrogate (named Cotard, presumably after the syndrome), a modestly successful regional theater director who scans the morning paper for interesting obits and the latest epidemiological news. (“Avian flu has spread to Turkey,” he announces at the breakfast table. “The country, not the bird.”) He’s a sedately neurotic, a real miserabilist, and—like Woody Allen in Hannah and Her Sisters, though neither Jewish nor comically relieving—a paranoid hypochondriac obsessed with death.

His wife leaves him, after which he gets a MacArthur Fellowship and begins creating a lasting masterwork, a play which he stages in a hangar so impossibly spacious that, in it, he can build a working, life-size model of New York City (a la Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, partly, with its searchlighted zeppelin). “We’re all hurtling towards death…each of us secretly believing that we won’t [die],” Hoffman says. “That’s what I want to explore.” The scope of the production becomes so epic that the hangar becomes a part of the hangar. He hires someone to play himself, and an actor to play the actor playing himself. His love interest becomes interested in the actor playing himself, so he has sex with the actress playing her.

In short, it’s a standard-issue Charlie Kaufman mindfuck, though is reaches farther into the outer edges of cinema and the human brain than he has hitherto ever attempted. Most of Kaufman’s previous films, Being John Malkovich to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, have been set, at least in part, within the characters’ minds. Synecdoche follows suit, though not explicitly, like Adaptation’s last third. Hoffman’s manifest hypochondria, from bumps and legions on his skin to discolored urine and stool, is present in one scene and gone the next. He doesn’t age for “years,” he suddenly ages, he ages back again. He sees himself in chemotherapy ads on television and in children’s cartoons.

It’s surreal; Samantha Morton, in a supporting role as love interest, buys a house that’s on fire and lives in it through the film. (“I’m concerned about the fire,” she says as she considers buying it. “It’s a big decision,” the real estate agent answers, “deciding how to die.”) Synecdoche plays out as one long nightmarish and expressionistic fantasy with no clear demarcation, if such a boundary exists at all in the film, between the hallucinated and the real. (Although little seems real in Synecdoche; at one point, Hoffman drips “Tear Substitute” into his eye before he begins to weep.) But Kaufman never acknowledges his own absurdity, legitimizing the film’s lack of logic through his straight-faced acceptance of it, in the tradition of the great surrealists.

Like Last Year in Marienbad, some unspoken tragedy seems to inform the action. Is Hoffman in a coma? In limbo? In Hell? Or simply buried in the recesses of his own mind? But as in Resnais’ film, the answers, of which there are none, aren’t important. The film’s power lies in its emotion, unaffected by whether the proceedings are a comatose dream or literalized psychotic imaginings. Synecdoche demands multiple viewings, but its multiple thematic strands are still immediately clear, at least intuitively.

Like 8½, it’s an artist’s mid-career working-through of his relationships with women—and thus particularly masculine—but it’s also an exploration of loneliness, loss, regret and the ways they intersect with artistic creation. Life is a play without an audience, Kaufman suggests, and so to make his life meaningful—and less lonely—he tries to transform his into a viewable piece of art. Such a project takes a lifetime; he’s literally dying to get at something real. (“I won’t accept anything but the brutal truth,” he tells his actors. “Brutal! Brutal!”) At one point, a member of his cast asks, “when are we going to get an audience? It’s been 17 years.”

Hoffman comes to understand that he is but one person on a planet full of them. “13 million people,” he says, “none of those people an extra. They’re all a lead in their own story.” But Synecdoche isn’t about just any one of those 13 million. Kaufman himself is the film’s lead; despite its universality, the movie remains exclusively his story. The director is no solipsist but he is a narcissist. And the closest the movie gets to a happy ending is the suggestion that this control-freak’s only chance at peace is to surrender his ego. (And to let himself be played by a woman. Maybe he becomes a woman himself? Or a homosexual?) During this epic struggle of self, Kaufman intimates that revolution is on the streets outside the hangar, that the external world is in political upheaval, but he’s more interested in keeping the camera on Hoffman’s face—in celebrating individual worth. “No one wants to hear about my misery because they have their own,” Hoffman says. “Well, fuck everybody.” That is, don't let anyone tell you your private pains aren't worth telling the world about. That’s an idea that starts to cheer me up. Grade: A+


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Australia

Directed by: Baz Luhrmann
Written by: Stuart Beattie & Baz Luhrmann and Ronald Harwood & Richard Flanagan
Full credits from IMDb

Grade: 1/5

Youthenizing fusty genres — the Shakespeare adaptation, the Hollywood musical — is Baz Luhrmann’s stock in trade. His latest, Australia, which views his homeland through lenses more yahoo than serious, takes on two more: the outpost Western (with copious allusions to Shane, Ford, Hawks and Leone) and the historical epic (with its James Michener-esque title). But Luhrmann is no breather of new life, no reverent epigone. He’s a parodist — and this is his Epic Movie.

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Special

Written & Directed by: Hal Haberman & Jeremy Passmore
Full credits from IMDb

Grade: 3/5

In its first act, Special, a quasi-superhero movie that posits the costumed fighter as deluded pillhead, feels like a standard-issue Sundance snoozer: Michael Rapaport plays Les, a lonely outsider, an L.A. (natch) traffic cop like the lovers in Expired, Park City exemplar. He eats microwave dinners alone in front of the T.V. His best friends are chubby stoners — one of whom is a babyfatted Josh Peck, to the assumed outrage of Nickheads and their parents — who run the comic book store where he kills his lunch hour. His love interest is a speech-handicapped convenience store clerk. His diary, read in voice-over to talk us through the movie, includes entries such as, “people shouldn’t give up, no matter how alone they feel, because anything is possible.”

But the indie trappings are a ploy; Special cleverly transforms its quirk into menace, becoming a cultural criticism aimed at the ubiquity of arrogant self-importance.

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The Betrayal

Directed by: Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phravasath
Full credits from IMDb

Grade: 4/5

Before she became a sought-after cinematographer, Ellen Kuras — a frequent concert film camerawoman and Michel Gondry collaborator — began shooting a documentary about a Laotian refugee, Thavisouk Phrasavath. After nearly 30 years of working on the project in between Hollywood for-hire gigs, it’s finally finished. A non-polemical rebuttal to the Palinheads tired of apologizing for America, The Betrayal (Nerakhoon) shows there’s still plenty to be sorry about.

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A Christmas Tale

Directed by: Arnaud Desplechin
Written by: Emmanuel Bourdieu & Arnaud Desplechin
Full credits from IMDb

Grade: 3/5

Director Desplechin doesn’t keep a comfortable distance from the characters in A Christmas Tale (Un Conte de Noel); he gets in close. Real close. When a doctor drips drawn blood onto a testing strip, Desplechin can’t leave it at that; he must get microscopically close, so he shows several shots of colliding blood cells. The thinking behind it, presumably, is that the nearer the camera gets to the actors’ bodies, the nearer the director gets to revealing his characters’ emotions; the only way to see the unseeable is to get right next to where it would be. So A Christmas Tale, a home-for-the-holidays character drama, is shot at a nose’s length.

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Gardens of the Night

Written & Directed by: Damian Harris
Full credits from IMDb

Grade: 3/5

Gardens of the Night deals in inherently sensationalist subject matter: kidnapping, child sex slaves and teenage prostitutes — each, apparently, more widespread in America than I thought. But writer-director Damian Harris does his best to keep the film free from salacity; it’s a tasteless story handled tastefully. An 8-year-old Catholic schoolgirl, Leslie (Ryan Simpkins), is on her way to class one morning when Tom Arnold, playing against type, enlists her in a lost-dog hunt that ends with him offering her a ride to school. You can see where this is headed.

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Let the Right One In

Directed by: Tomas Alfredson
Written by: John Ajvide Lindqvist
Full credits from IMDb

Let the Right One In (Låt den Rätte Komma In), a Swedish film about pre-adolescent angst and loneliness, centers on two 12 year olds: Kåre Hedebrant, a pale and friendless pantywaist, and his new neighbor, Lina Leandersson. She ignites his passions with her Rubik’s Cube prowess, and soon they’re sharing solving secrets and candies, the gateway to trustfully confessing their vulnerabilities. It’s a graceful, if somewhat ordinary, tale of young melancholy enhanced by its vampire parallel. Oh—Leandersson’s a vampire.

Slated for an American remake before the original had its American theatrical release, Let the Right One In is the best kind of horror movie, in which the horror isn’t the end but a means of amplifying the core human themes—a supporting story element. Vampirism takes a back seat in this film except when functional—when it’s used to inform the parable of tweenage love and loss. Above all, Alfredson’s interest lies in establishing Sweden’s snowscaped stillness and the emotional reality of the bullied bookworm. He deals not in pools of blood, only in small, occasional streaks and tasteful splashes onto white backgrounds. The remake should be awful.

It’s tough to imagine a Hollywood for-hire possessing the sensitivity with which Alfredson draws a parallel between being undead and being a lonely pre-teen or with which he approaches the blood suckers themselves. A la Chigurgh, though more severely, the vampires treat people like cattle: they stun them, hang them upside down by the hind legs, slit their throats and bleed them dry; the sweet stuff is collected in large plastic jugs. Or they lunge like wolves at unsuspecting humans.

But the monsters are still sadly sympathetic. A lady vampire chews out her family’s breadwinner for failing to properly collect blood, as though he were any un-undead man who couldn’t provide (and answered to a harridan). The vampires kill with guilt, satisfying an unfortunate but incurable addiction. Pitiably, Alfredson’s vampires lilt with hunger, their eyes rimmed with dark circles, their stomachs growling and gurgling with literal bloodthirst. In its view of violence, Let the Right One In ultimately tacks centrist. It says that sometimes it’s morally forgiveable to kill—when you must do it to survive—but it’s unacceptable to do it out of sheer anger. From the country that didn’t sign up with the Coalition of the Willing. Grade: B+


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Dear Zachary

Written & Directed by: Kurt Kuenne
Full credits from IMDb

Grade: 3/5

As a movie-memorial for a murdered mensch, Dear Zachary could have been terribly dull. Meant as a video letter to the dead man’s son, and built around home-movie footage and interviews with the victim’s family and friends, it might easily have had the effect of looking at an animated Facebook-album’s-worth of strangers’ conspicuously posed friends: so familiar, so foreign, so boring. But, thank goodness, director Kurt Kuenne (the victim’s childhood friend) knows it, so he compensates with copious B-roll and an exhilarating, rat-a-tat editing style. More importantly, though, he always keeps one eye on the titillating true-crime angle. Not merely a tribute to a by-all-accounts great guy, the epistolary Dear Zachary doubles as an engaging news piece; it triples as a cutting critique of the Canadian justice system’s bail procedures, extradition laws and child-custody practices.

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