Soundtracking: Rachel Getting Married
Wednesday, November 13, 2019 at 9:00AM by Chris Feil
Jonathan Demme’s career was populated with a musical sensibility that bordered on spirituality, more obviously so in his many music documentaries and the definitive Stop Making Sense. His narrative films could stealthily incorporate a hum of music integral to the world he was presenting, as keenly observed as his character details. From Something Wild to Philadelphia to even Ricki and the Flash, Demme would use music to make his stories come alive in authentic ways. Rachel Getting Married, his late career masterpiece, has a musical language all its own, one that represents the film’s simmering grief and provides its necessary catharsis.
Music appears to be a particular and unconventional Demme-ian stamp on the film, essential to the emotional experience of the film but not an element you might expect given the material. The film features a family of music aficionados and adjacent musicians populating its massive house preparing for the titular Rachel’s (Rosemarie DeWitt) wedding. But the central focus is on Anne Hathaway’s Kym, an addict still in active rehabilitory recovery and the central cause of the family’s lingering grief. The plotline sounds like many other rote things we’ve seen, but its near ceaseless stream of music is one way Demme makes the familiar unique down to the film's final moments.
And the film’s musicality matches Demme’s improvisational and morphing style. Donald Harrison Jr. and Zafer Tawil get the original score credit, but it isn’t exactly a traditional score. We hear the wedding band rehearsing across the home as Demme’s camera wanders, following Kym between her various verbal disasters. As the music flows like tides of tension, it comes to be a sonic representation of all the anguish that is going unsaid, and the mounting anxiety of Kym’s mere presence in a family setting.
But music also takes an active, less metaphorical place for the family as well, and just as deeply felt. Demme provides a joyous extended sequence of Rachel and her fiancé Sidney's (TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe) rehearsal dinner, populated by jazz musicians and vocalists (Tamyra Gray cameo!) treating music as both celebration of shared joy and literal gift bestowed upon them. The guests join in a musical chant of their names that makes them feel the immense, cumulative love for them in the room. When Kym gives a speech of atonal, self-centered half penance, you wish for the uncomplicated feeling found in song - but nothing with Kym is ever so easy.
The film’s most standalone musical moment comes at the wedding itself, after the family’s agony has been laid bare and Kym and Rachel have inched towards some reconciliation. Sidney spontaneously bursts into Neil Young’s “Unknown Legend” during the ceremony, a song of romantic awe, to a silently moved crowd. It’s an act of love that is defined by the tenderness of its melody, as specific as the emotional pain we’ve witnessed already, and as fragile in Adebimpe’s precious vocal.
Here Demme offers music as a point of catharsis, more than just a lovely moment in a picturesque wedding. It’s a reminder, after the film has examined the capacity of the one’s we love to cause us grave harm, that love can also be simple and pure and restorative. Everyone at the wedding cries, and it’s partly for gratitude to Sidney for showing this.
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Reader Comments (11)
Love Winger in this,the music helps a lot to get through this film,which I found hard going,though the cast was uniformily excellent even Bill Irwin in his tiny role.
I’m always fascinated by the music. It’s both a complex language for communication and expression within this family—and the thing that’s conferred wealth, worldliness, status and comfort on them.
Love the shots of Winger sitting stonefaced (or faintly smiling) while people dance and experience the music. You can tell none of this was EVER her thing. Compare that to how loose and free Anna Deveare Smith is in similar shots.
Still my favorite film of 2008. One of the most intimate films I've ever seen.
Always loved the Rogue Wave’e version of Buddy Holly’s “Everyday” in the trailer for this film. Favorite movie moment associated with this movie after “Unknown Legend”
This movie keeps popping up everywhere and I think it's beautiful.
It certainly wasn't the first film I ever experienced where live music was integrated into the plot in a non-musical or music-oriented film, but I loved how the sound mix picked up all the little interstitial music and how it became evident that the music was being played in the house. So much so that the characters would comment on the how annoying their own underscoring was. Loved it. Still gets me every time.
An Unknown Legend is brilliant.
An extremely underrated film that gets better with age and a killer music soundtrack.
DeWitt and Hathaway should have won Oscars.
Love everything about this movie.
And the scene, THE scene for me, is the one with the dishwasher. So heartbreaking.
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