Demme: Rachel Getting Married (2008)

Rachel Getting Married is Jonathan Demme’s first fictional foray into digital cinematography, but it harks back to his 70s output more than anything he’s done subsequently. In part, that’s because it revolves around a washed-out, downbeat, big house narrative that gives him plenty of scope to bring in a peculiarly 70s brand of ambience. However, it’s also because Demme treats digital technology first and foremost as a sonic possibility, rather than a visual possibility, fulfilling his career-long dream to craft a film that is driven almost entirely by its soundscape. Against that backdrop, Jenny Lumet’s screenplay revolves around Kim (Anne Hathaway), a recovering drug addict who’s released from rehab to attend the wedding of her sister, Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt), over a single weekend at their family house in Stamford, Connecticut. As might be expected, all the family issues come to light, and are beautifully articulated by a cast that includes Bill Irwin, Anna Deavere Smith and Debra Winger. But they’re continually collapsed back into the collectivity of this extraordinary wedding, in which every guest seems to have an equally important role to play, an equally momentous performance to impart, to the point where it’s more like a chautauqua than a wedding, a community that exceeds any single romantic or familial arrangement. Most of that community are musical – Robyn Hitchcock and Tunde Adepimbe play key roles – and there’s music all the way through, always percolating in from the next room, or from the garden, magical even or especially when it’s muted, or when it appears to be captured accidentally, or inadvertently. Everything is filtered through a rainy kind of ambience, the way several days of straight drizzle can make even the most confined spaces feel porous, just as the action rarely stays in one room for more than a few minutes before it spills over into another one, or another one spills over into it. Not only does that generate mood changes that are subliminal and sudden at the same time – you notice them, suddenly, in retrospect – but it allows Demme to create a tangible, tactile awareness of everyone’s collective anticipation that’s not dissimilar to the embodied looseness of his 70s films. Here, collectivity is something you feel before you hear, and hear before you see, as Demme places his camera right there in the diegesis, until it's like watching a hand-held home movie by someone actually attending the party. And it’s by attending his film, rather than directing it, that Demme leaves his mark, makes you feel that analog sound is always non-diegetic, always alienated, always longing to spread out and come alive like it does here.