The ties that bind

Anne Hathaway and Debra Winger
on Jonathan Demme’s rich, theatrical
family drama Rachel Getting Married

TWISTED SISTERS: Hathaway and DeWitt

by MARK SLUTSKY

The best films inspire the best conversations, and I knew Rachel Getting Married was something special when, days after seeing it, I still couldn’t stop talking about it. A richly layered ensemble family drama, it deals with pretty heavy themes—addiction, mourning, damaged parent-child relationships—in a way that never feels heavy. Set over a few days at a wedding, it has the energy of a real-life event that you feel like you’ve been invited along to as an observer. Watching the almost Altman-like density of the characters’ interactions, it seems like you’re seeing a real extended family with its own textured history, with stories and relationships you may never hear out in their entirety—but you know they’re there.

It feels like a comeback of sorts for director Jonathan Demme, who’s been steadily producing docs for the last decade or so (Jimmy Carter:Man From Plains, The Agronomist) but who’s stumbled in his narrative filmmaking, with two high-profile remakes (The Trouble With Charlie and The Manchurian Candidate) that ended up as critical and commercial duds.

Rachel Getting Married stars Anne Hathaway, in a strong, uncharacteristic performance, as Kim, an addict in recovery who leaves rehab for the wedding of her sister Rachel (Rosemary DeWitt). Their parents (Bill Irwin and Debra Winger) have long since split up, and there’s a tragedy in the not-so-distant past, the death of their younger brother. Suffice to say the family dynamic is fraught.

Their story plays out against a weekend of speeches, food, games, fights—what happens when two families get together for a wedding, in other words. Oh and music, plenty of music: most of the soundtrack cleverly consists of the wedding band rehearsing, and there are appearances by musicians like Robyn Hitchcock, Fab Five Freddy and Sister Carol, playing family friends and singing a song here and there. It’s hard not to feel like you’re just another guest.

PRICKLY PARENT: Debra Winger

Princess no longer

The film’s principal cast, along with writer Jenny Lumet (daughter of director Sidney) spoke to the Mirror at September’s Toronto International Film Festival. Despite being in the middle of a tabloid nightmare involving her breakup with shady Italian developer Raffaello Follieri, Hathaway sweeps into the room perfectly poised, cheerful and talkative.

“I’m just amazed every day that Jonathan saw something in my previous work that would imply this performance, because certainly no one else had,” she says.

She’s not kidding: the tortured, guilt-ridden, attention-craving Kim is a long, long way from The Princess Diaries. One of the first to be cast, Hathaway spent close to a year studying her character and researching addiction. “I talked to the family members of people in recovery and then I just thought about Kim,” she says. “I had a lot of instincts from the get-go about what she was like, and a lot of them are in the movie. I spent the year basically trying to analyze my instincts and make sure that they could be followed up, that I wasn’t romanticizing anything or being dramatic in my thoughts or really being an ‘actor,’ I just wanted to make sure that Kim was real for me from the inside out.”

Shooting on HD, Demme had the freedom to let scenes play out organically, which seems to have enabled the actors to really inhabit their roles. “We wouldn’t know where the camera was going to be, and apparently Jonathan and Declan [Quinn, Rachel’s cinematographer] wouldn’t even discuss where the camera was going to be,” Hathaway says. “We would just go and because the camera could follow us, we didn’t have to chop it up—we’d do take after take after take, 12 minutes long, 15 minutes long. Some takes, like in the rehearsal dinner scene, one of those takes was about an hour and a half and you were just there, concentrating in character. It felt like doing theatre. And it was delicious. It was just what you dream of as an actor—no distractions.”

“There was very little rehearsal,” says Irwin. “Much of everything was found in the course of two things: hanging out together, because Jonathan didn’t rehearse us, but he brought people together, and we watched some films and spent time around each other before day one of shooting. And then the shooting process and the style he invented was much more like theatre, so you play a whole scene and then you play it again and the camera would go in a different place. That’s when those parts of life found themselves.”

The real dish

In one memorable scene, Irwin faces off against Sidney, the groom (Tunde Adebimpe), in a dishwasher-stacking competition that says more about their relationship than a more dialogue-driven scene ever could. It’s also one that Lumet took directly from life. “The dishwasher scene actually happened in a very glamorous way,” the writer, who still works as a drama teacher in a Manhattan high school, says.

“Yes, I’m related to a lot of famous people and so you have access to other famous people, but it’s not like Elizabeth Taylor was under the sink. It wasn’t like that. But, on this one particular occasion, the obscenely brilliant Bob Fosse was at our house for dinner and my dad was loading the dishwasher at the end and Bob Fosse comes over. This languid, long, gorgeous person, he was like ‘You know, Sidney’—with a cigarette—‘You know, Sidney, if you put the salad bowls on the top, you could get 10% more.’

“And Sidney, short, round—one is this long kind of snake and the other is a tennis ball—says ‘Oh yeah? Go fuck yourself, Fosse!’ And then, for the rest of the evening, the two of them were throwing stuff in the dishwasher. And I think that was obviously a director thing, because Demme does it too.”

But she denies that the family in Rachel is otherwise based on hers: “Everybody’s family is nuts, yes? Everybody goes to a wedding and becomes completely insane. And everybody either has an addict in their family or knows a family that’s been touched by it in one way or another.”

Life lessons

If Rachel marks a comeback for Demme, it also does so in a big way for Debra Winger, who hasn’t had a role this good in decades. “What attracted me,” she says, “was that Jonathan was really lit up with the idea of shooting it this way, to show up in character and just have the wedding and to record it. And I thought, that sounds like an interesting way of working, I’m willing to try that, I’ve never done it before, I’ve never shot on video, I’ve always only shot film, so I wanted to experience that new technology. He’s done some films I’ve loved, and I think there was also this feeling that we’d wanted to work together and didn’t get a chance to.”

Her part, as the family’s damaged, withholding mother, Abby, occupies a relatively small part of the film’s screen time, but her presence looms over everyone. “I think that she is more weathered, I would hope, than me,” she says of her character. “I think she’s been a little more beaten up by life.

“We all tell stories for different reasons, you know; I consider myself a storyteller, that’s why I act. And I think I tell this story, thank God, because I haven’t lived it. And I don’t know if I could tell that story if I had lost a child. I find stories about that particular loss compelling because I personally can’t imagine going on. It would just be the hardest thing in the world. I get nervous even saying the words, because I have children. But we have to tell these stories, because if it makes somebody who has children walk into their door and see their kids more thankfully in that moment, or if it makes somebody who has had that loss feel just a little sane, then we’ve done our job as storytellers.”

RACHEL GETTING MARRIED OPENS
THIS FRIDAY, OCT. 17