Rachel Getting Married.

"Those who believe that Jonathan Demme went all soft with Philadelphia and never recovered may not be reassured by his latest movie, an ensemble tale of family pathology gussied up with vérité camera work, world music, and improvising actors both trained and not," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "You can find the worst and the best of Demme in Rachel Getting Married, which may be an avowed fan's fond farewell to Robert Altman, but it's still a middlebrow domestic drama beating its wings against an experimental frame."

"With only the occasional narrative intrusion, the final sequence is one of the more joyous nuptials captured on film," writes Andrew Schenker in Slant. "From the appealingly informal ceremony with its new-age inflections - and interlaced with cutaway shots to a genuinely moved [Anne] Hathaway - to a series of generically varied musical performances during the reception (Demme's commitment to cultural diversity means the guests perform in rock, folk, jazz and R&B modes), the wedding finds the director taking control of his film and imbuing it with the celebratory warmth that comes from a genuine embrace of democratic plurality."

Updated through 10/6.

"Demme goes a bit overboard trying to casually depict post-racial multiculturalism," concedes Nick Schager. "Still, if that minor point, as well as gratuitous cameos by Demme mentor Roger Corman and friend Robyn Hitchcock during the slightly overcooked finale, puncture the otherwise engrossingly real, lived-in atmosphere, they do so only fleetingly, mere minor stumbles in a superbly wrought family drama that, more than most, genuinely understands and tenderly expresses how messy, complicated, troubled and compassionate familial relationships can be."

"The wild wedding at the center of Rachel Getting Married is a simultaneously alienating and ingratiating affair - the film wants you to join the party but keeps reminding you you're probably not cool enough to be invited," writes Michael Koresky at indieWIRE. "Shot with the kind of camerawork that immediately announces itself as somehow inherently more 'real' by virtue of its being handheld (what is this, 1992?), Rachel Getting Married seems intended to remind viewers of Demme's vitality as a fiction filmmaker, his youthful, just-off-mainstream persona." But: "The more Rachel Getting Married screams 'Truth!' at its audience, the less truthful, of course, it becomes."

"Demme is a genial filmmaker, light on his feet, forever taken aback—even embarrassed—by the way in which his stories drift toward pain," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "That was true of Something Wild and The Silence of the Lambs, in which terror and black comedy rolled together like dice, and it’s there in the mood swings of - a minor work, but so menaced by distress that the characters take every opportunity to dance the dark away."

"You root for the movie the way you root for a friend to charm during a wedding toast, or for a sister to finally kick the habit," writes Mark Asch in the L Magazine.

"Avoiding the hip nihilism of repugnant family dramas like Margot at the Wedding and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, Demme offers compassion," argues, yes, Armond White in the New York Press.

"With Rachel Getting Married, Demme, 64, has returned to the playful, deeply humanist storytelling of such early work as 1980's Melvin and Howard and 1986's Something Wild, both of which are widely acknowledged as having influenced a younger generation of filmmakers." Mark Olsen talks with him for the Los Angeles Times, where Susan King meets screenwriter Jenny Lumet and Michael Ordoña talks with Rosemarie DeWitt.

Online listening tips. James Rocchi talks with Hathaway for Cinematical and Demme's a guest on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Earlier: Reviews from Venice and Toronto.

Updates, 10/3: "[T]he wonderful thing about Rachel Getting Married is how expansive it seems, in spite of the limits of its scope and the modesty of its ambitions," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "It's a small movie, and in some ways a very sad one, but it has an undeniable and authentic vitality, an exuberance of spirit, that feels welcome and rare."

"[T]he movie registers as a restoration of the richly humane, pre-indie ensemble drama that Demme and Woody Allen defined in the 1980s, and France's Arnaud Desplechin now makes as a matter of course," writes Joshua Rothkopf in Time Out New York.

"With an easy, freeflowing style - owing partially to the Dogme-style approach that has led some to compare the film to The Celebration - Demme captures the group dynamic of the wedding party, with its seismic shifts in mood from celebratory to melancholy and back again," writes Scott Tobias at the AV Club. "It may be painful at times, but Rachel Getting Married sure is one heck of a party."

Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times: "It's a gratifying return to his independent film roots for Oscar-winning director Demme, a powerful screenwriting debut for Jenny Lumet, a herculean job of hand-held cinematography by Declan Quinn and a career-changing performance by Anne Hathaway, of all people, as an ultra-troubled young woman set loose from rehab for her sister's wedding."

Elisabeth Donnelly talks with Hathaway and Demme for Tribeca.

"Handling his ensemble cast and their overlapping dialogue with Altmanesque dexterity, Demme sits us down at the table," writes Rick Groen in the Globe and Mail. "We're right there for the gaiety spontaneous and forced, for the speeches gracious and cringe-making. Most distressingly, though, we're there for the feared yet inevitable moment when Kym seizes the microphone. She's a mass of good intentions gone horribly sour, unable to stop from embarrassing herself and everyone around her. Hathaway, who hinted at her potential in Brokeback Mountain, is a revelation in this scene, oscillating from bravado to brittleness, revealing the inner hell of a woman doubly mired in guilt, bearing the twin burdens of her addiction and her addiction's deadly legacy."

Peter Knegt profiles Lumet for indieWIRE.

"The best way to work around the director's self-sabotage would be, I think, to get the DVD, skip past the reception music, watch the rest of the movie, and then go back and listen to the songs later," suggests Alonso Duralde at MSNBC. "That way, you'll get to enjoy a fine script as well as Jonathan Demme's favorite bands without feeling like the director just lost his way."

Updates, 10/4: Matthew DeBord talks with Debra Winger for the LAT.

"The very premise... rankles," argues Marcy Dermansky. "Anne Hathaway shows off a new, adult side in the role of Kym, allowed to let loose in her edgiest role since the straight-to-DVD Havoc.... The very believability of it all makes Rachel Getting Married even harder to endure."

Update, 10/6: "In Demme's last 'personal' fiction film, The Truth About Charlie (I'm not counting his Manchurian Candidate remake), the overflowing humanism - multicultural musicians everywhere you looked, and the camera made you look - overwhelmed the narrative," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Demme was starting to seem fatuously humanistic. But in Rachel Getting Married, his generous impulses pay off."

Posted by dwhudson at October 2, 2008 3:09 PM