Rachel Getting Married

"Just as Long as there's Health"

Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here to join Robert Altman's "A Wedding," James L. Brooks' "Terms of Endearment," Robert Redford's "Ordinary People," and Otto Preminger's "Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon" in a Wholly hand-held digitized Indie Matrimony. Do you promise to love and cherish this movie through Sundance and Award-Season, through Oscar Campaigns and Buzz-Kill. Do you promise to watch over the dodgy home-movie-like photography, the world-music wedding sequences, the roller-coaster ride of joyful scene, painful revelation, funny scene, hysterical over-reaction, calming lull, screaming match, cathartic suicide attempt, reconciliation and subtle revelation?

You do? Really? ....(really?!)

Well...uh...then, may I present "Rachel Getting Married," a fine film with a good pedigree that manages to unfold slowly like an Altman film, but with a definite point to reach, story-wise and some terrific performances by a great ensemble cast. I've seen lots of culture-clash wedding movies before--they're a good source for forced comedy, always a little too forced. But here, from a script by Jenny Lumet (Sidney's kid), the complicated back-story is revealed organically, when the characters are ready to reveal it, with a protracted amount of time thwacking and hacking through the thicket of recrimination and resentment and nobody talking about "it," they're usually raising their voices about what's happening right NOW! There are moments you want to walk out into the lobby discretely to let them work it all out, which happens quite a bit in this movie.

The tough part in this type of thing is for the actors to carry the history without giving too much away and to prolong the interest, and fortunately, Jonathan Demme has cast a great range of actors, particularly funny-man Bill Irwin, who is a more interior and less volcanic Robin Williams. When Williams has a plot revelation, it's everything to keep it contained in a burst of hyper-volatility, but Irwin (who goofed with Williams in the "Don't Worry, Be Happy" video) is a more suppressed performer, with the discipline of a mime. Revelations have to be pulled out of him (with an invisible rope!).

As his wife (and support system), Anna Deavere Smith--a great joy in "The West Wing," and was one of the few actors to come out looking good in "The Human Stain." As Irwin's ex-wife, Debra Winger, and anytime Winger's in a movie, it's an event. Here, she's the mom-harpie that she played against in "Terms of Endearment," and where Shirley MacLaine was show-stopping trooper, Winger submerges it, and lets it out in dribs and drabs, which is the perfect strategy. Rosemarie DeWitt plays the eponymous "Rachel" (and why that title is so important becomes clear in the film) in a role that at the dawn of the indie boom would have been played by Annabeth Gish.

But over-shadowing the movie like a little black cloud is Anne Hathaway as the family member with a three day pass from re-hab, who's working on addictions to well, just about everything...booze, narcotics, tobacco, danger, sex, drama, attention ("Hello, I'm Shiva, the Destroyer," she begins her wedding toast). There's a semi-running gag of her running into people all-too-familiar with her past (A 7-11 clerk sees her enter and brightens, "Didn't I see you on "Cops?"). Hathaway is a little thunderstorm, chain-smoking, machine-gunning dialogue, hyper-needy, guaranteed to say the inappropriate thing, and every scene she's in you wait for the bomb to go off--she's your worst Liza Minnelli nightmare. And when she reaches a moment of relative tranquility, the film loses some of its charge, even though it's nice to have a little "relative" peace and quiet. Don't count her out of the Oscar race.

"Rachel Getting Married" is a Matinee.

Cannery Row

"Cannery Row" (David S. Ward, 1982) Quirky adaptation of John Steinbeck's sublime tales of the Monterey Dock District* that didn't do well at the box-office despite one of Nick Nolte's best performances, and an early starring performance by Debra Winger.

"Doc" (Nolte) is a marine biologist living a spartan existence on the row, but he's still the king in a society of wharf-bums and hookers. Like any good eco-system, there is a harmony amongst the denizens with a loose-knit economic system of favors performed and the occassional get-rich-quick scheme.

But the introduction of a new critter can upset any established ecology, and so the arrival of Suzy DeSoto (Winger) causes havoc within the community. She's a good kid down on her luck who catches "Doc's" eye, though he's afraid to commit, content to merely observe and annotate. She fails miserably at hooking, though, inspiring the madam, Fauna (Audra Lindley), to crass attempts at match-making. Comfortable nowhere, but with no ability to leave, she makes a home in a large, abandoned storage-tank and settles for a kind of independence.

It's a ruefully funny semi-tall tale sublimely told with an ironic narration by the honey-magnolia tones of John Huston. The cast is full of slovenly cherubic character actors who would fir well into a John Ford stock company--Frank McRae, M. Emmett Walsh, Tom Mahoney and John Malloy. "Cannery Row" is a bit like a Ford film as it deals with community and the integration of a new-comer into the fold, and how the community reacts to them and also how that community reacts to crisis.

"Cannery Row" is one of those films I love. Every viewing of it is like seeing an old friend.

* They comprise the novels "Cannery Row" and its sequel "Sweet Thursday"