Rachel Getting Married

It's worth noting the similarities between Jonathan Demme's Rachel Getting Married and last year's brilliant Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach's take on the "dysfunctional family dealing with pending nuptials" genre, mostly because both films tackle the same emotional territory -- fraught sibling relationships, a severe repression of past traumas -- with such candor and ease.  Both films are examples of a perfect fusion of form and content; while Baumbach represents the stilted nature of Margot's reunion with her sister Pauline most notably in the writing, showing us only pieces of certain conversations and cutting his characters off somewhat awkwardly in an effort to represent their struggle to reassimilate, Demme does the same thing visually, his somewhat shaky handheld camera (combined with tight framing) acting to position us as an outsider frantic to gather as much information as possible but never being able to quite penetrate the web of strained relationships that tends to complicate itself even further during formal celebrations such as, incidentally, weddings.  The fact that the muddle is worth clearing up, then, is almost taken for granted, and while neither film makes any real attempt at closure, the journey into the heart of the beast -- the beast here being the broken, suburban, vaguely affluent modern family -- is one worth taking.  My only lingering problem with Margot was its coldness, but while Rachel has a lot more heart, its openness at times extends into an uncomfortable knee-jerk multiculturalism, a cacophony of influences that fail to coalesce into a recognizable tradition... which is fine, I guess, but distracting in an unnecessary way, handicapping certain moments with colorful silliness which would have otherwise packed more of a punch.  Jenny Lumet's script for Rachel, though, is stellar, and is distinctly Baumbachian in many ways, especially with the ending; as in Margot (and Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale), the film's final moments reveal a narrative throughline that we have been previously distracted from, as in Rachel we become embroiled in what we thought was a story about an addict's (Anne Hathaway's Kym) return to her family before discovering that this was really a story about Rachel all along, a subtle chronicle of her struggle to live meaningful experiences in the midst of other people's problems.  It's particularly conspicuous how we finally stick with her in the end as the camera comes to a stop and settles in for a long take as the credits roll.  Only when the film is officially over do we finally see Rachel standing alone, a distinct and noble figure caught in a family drama largely out of her control, just as in Margot we discover, after seeing Nicole Kidman spontaneously sprint after a bus at the very end of the film, that this story was not about a wedding, or even sisters or mid-life crises, but rather about a woman simply trying to figure out how to be a better mother.