Hello, lovelies. Beau here, filling in for Nathaniel on this week's Monday Monologue, featuring a film that is packed full of them.
Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married was, for my money, the best film of 2008. (Nathaniel shared my sentiments, though we don't always see eye to eye: note our complete polarized responses to the masterful Cloud Atlas last year.) That's not a title it earned easily, considering that it was also the year I was exposed to Charlie Kaufman's brilliant Synechdoche, New York as well as Christian Mungiu's Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, a film I lovingly referred to as 'that Romanian abortion picture' to friends who recoiled and cocked their heads at the thought of sitting through something like that.
No, what moved me the most, what hurt me the most was this small, intimate picture filmed on digital with many striking nods to the Dogme movement of the nineties, (filmed on location, hand-held, diegetic music) and providing a piercing, at times intrusive look at the lives of this shattered family. In it, each actor does the best work of their career. [more]
Bill Irwin is criminally underutilized in the film world, and his effusive joy and sorrow here is palpable, naturally theatrical, and magnificent. Rosemarie DeWitt is sublime as the titular Rachel whose attention and focus is being hijacked by Kym, played by Anne Hathaway.
Hathaway, until Rachel, was not considered by many to be a great actress. She was, at best, an intensely charismatic one, one who could carry everything from a Disney flick (The Princess Diaries, Ella Enchanted) and was making a pretty remarkable transition into popular adult fare (The Devil Wears Prada, Brokeback Mountain, etc.) Yet she still had not proven herself. Until Kym. In many ways, it is this performance that defined her career -- at least until Les Miserables -- and arguably changed many minds about her talents.
When I watch Rachel Getting Married, I don't see Anne Hathaway. I see no mannerisms, no tics, no indications of who this person may be other than herself. Kym's damaged appearance lends itself to Hathaway's success, but she is not defined by it. Rare is the modern movie star that can completely disassociate themself from their Hollywood persona.
When I think about Hathaway in the picture, I think of one scene in particular.
Hi, I’m Kym, I’m an addict.
I am nine months clean.
When I was, umm, 16,
I was babysitting my little brother.
And I was, umm, I was taking all these Percocet and I was unbelievably high and I,
umm, we had driven over to the park on Lakeshore and he was in his red socks and just running around in these pile of leaves and he would bury me and I would bury him,
in the leaves,
and he was pretending he was a train
and so he was running through the leaves and I was the caboose
and he kept saying
Coal Caboose, Coal Caboose,
and umm, umm, we were,
it was time to go and I was driving home,
and I lost control of the car
and drove off the bridge
and the car went into the lake
and I couldn’t get him out of his car seat
and he drowned.
And I struggle with God so much,
because I can’t forgive myself
and I don’t really want to.
I can live with it, but I can’t forgive myself,
and sometimes I don’t want to believe in a God that could forgive me.
But I do want to be sober.
I’m alive and i’m present and there’s nothing controlling me.
If I hurt someone, I hurt someone, and I can apologize and they can forgive me or not,
but I can change.
And I just wanted to share that and say, ‘Congratulations that God makes you look up, I’m so happy for you, but if he doesn’t, come here.’
That’s all, thank you.
It's the moment where Demme's film, guarded and protective of its secret, opens. And with it comes the pain and everything else. What is so telling and true about Hathaway's work here is in its own guardedness. For everything that's said about her or assumed, we learn here how self-effacing and aware Kym is. Her gravitational pull brings others to her, their attention, something Rachel doesn't tap into until later in the picture. Indeed, the family as a whole is a very theatrical one, in the best sense of the word. The highs and lows aren't played for laughs, sobs or even an audience. In many ways, the Buchman tribe are a repertory without an audience. They each trade different roles, positions, thoughts with one another, and it's fascinating to see how they interact with one another.
But Hathaway is perfect in the scene. For a film so concerned with and intrigued by family dynamics, it's strange that one of its most subtle moments is the one that could be played most for reaction. Kym isn't concerned with people's views on her or her tragedy, she's not looking to make a dramatic appeal for forgiveness. She accepts her situation and the ramifications that it has had, and will continue to have, on her life. Her testimonial her is more to herself. Making little eye contact with anyone, really, a very limited interaction at all, her acceptance of her role in the death of Ethan is something she's vocalizing, maybe for the first time. As we come to know Kym, we see that she is, indeed, capable of lying to many people, least of all, to herself. Is this the first opportunity she's had to come clean on the issue? It's not a territory one would want to cover often. Say your peace and get the hell out.
Hathaway averts eye contact, less out of shame and more out of necessity. Specifying your crime against your family, your life, your self, she's not looking for empathy here like she does with her family. She's looking for forgiveness from herself. And when she realizes, part of the way through that even saying the facts won't change them, won't change her feeling about them, she understands that she will live with it but she will never recover from it. Like a battle wound or an amputated appendange, you can learn to walk again, you can learn to talk again, move again, but you'll never be what you were.
Hathaway understands that the most damaged of us sometimes lose ourselves,
and we never really get them back.
All you get to do is build on the memory of what you were,
what you could have been,
to a place where maybe, just maybe,
one day you'll knock the demons out of your head.
Room for something new to grow.
Room for Absolution.
And as she extends her thanks for their ears and their time,
she lowers her head to her chest,
and reverts back into the comfort of her pain and her failure,
like a cocoon with a pillow and a down comforter,
waiting to wake up.
____________________
And you, dear readers, are you as much a fan of Hathaway in this picture or do youhave another MVP?
Do you think this one of the signature works of Demme's career, or a slight forgetable blip? Talk Rachel (and Kym) to us in the Comments.
Beau McCoy is a twenty-six year old aspiring playwright who has just completed his fourth play. He is currently in hot pursuit of his Bachelor's Degree before applying to numerous graduate schools for the Fall of 2014. His favorite films include Harold and Maude, Love and Death, Old Joy, Before Sunset, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, and Death Proof. You can follow him on Twitter, though he mainly retweets things others have said better and more eloquently than he's capable of.
