March 30th, 2009

I did manage to watch Rachel Getting Married last night and I enjoyed it.  It’s amazing how you get deeper into someone’s life, and how little comments made earlier in the movie (like the first scene) are much more hurtful than you initially thought.  This story unravels at a good pace, and you can see the underlying issues come forward.  Funny that I didn’t have the sense that you did that this was a wedding that I wouldn’t want to attend.   Actually the food and the music seemed marvelous.   There was a curious mix of ethnic genres here (Indian, African, blues, island), and there were some cliché areas that could have gone wrong but they (to their credit did not) – like the racial issue.   The Father is an interesting figure here, as I also thought was Debra Winger as the Mother and the pivotal scene where daughter goes to confront Mother.  Sadly we don’t get much of a resolution on that front, except my take which was that Mom was just looking to put that all behind her and move on.    I started not liking the me-only Hathaway character but she became more sympathetic as you explored her a little more.  She feels, and feels deeply.   Her reaction to those feelings are self-destructive, and it was very emotional for me to think about what she went through in that car.   I thought that the rest of the cast played this out well.