Toronto 2008: 'Rachel Getting Married' and 'Orson Welles'

It's hard to pinpoint when, exactly, the documentary-style hand-held camera became a major stylistic force in movie drama—Martin Scorsese certainly gave it an early jolt of artistry in Mean Streets (1973)—but by now, we've all seen enough swervy, jittery, bobbing-camera film fictions to have grown all but immune to the technique. In 1992, when Woody Allen went hand-held in Husbands and Wives, it seemed a trendy affectation (and one that made more than a few people literally queasy). By the time the Dogma 95 movement came about, hand-held movies tended to win praise from critics for their radical austerity, though to me the rawness of the visual technique in, say, The Celebration only highlighted the trumped-up fakery of what was actually transpiring on screen. So when I tell you that Rachel Getting Married, the new Jonathan Demme picture, is a family drama shot in long, spontaneous takes with a hand-held camera that feels as jumpy and brash as a home-video camcorder, you'd be perfectly justified if you said, "Yawn! What else is new?"

But Rachel Getting Married is something new indeed. It's not just Demme's images that are blistering and off-balance and intimately alive. So is everything that happens to the Buchanans, a prosperous Connecticut family who live on a beautiful leafy estate, and who are marrying off their eldest daughter, Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt), to Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe), who is some sort of hotshot in the music business. He is also African-American, a fact that the movie exquisitely ignores (though that doesn't mean it isn't central to the dramatic texture).

Rachel's younger sister, Kym (Anne Hathaway, pictured), has been an addict since she was a teenager. (Which drugs? How about all of them.) For this special occasion, she is being let out of rehab for the weekend. Getting cast as a compulsively self-loathing, frayed-nerves drug casualty is certainly a stretch for an actress as lovely and red-carpet fresh as Anne Hathaway, yet from the moment she shows up, her eyes peering out with a junkie's paranoid radar from beneath her Louise Brooks-helmet-slashed-with-a-straight-razor hair, the actress wires you into her rage and awareness. Kym is a walking disaster, but a disaster with feelers, and the effect she has on the other members of her family is to electrify them with the dreaded truths she calls up. Hathaway is a revelation: She shoots far beyond giving a damn about her "likability" in a performance as scalding as it is controlled. She makes toxic narcissism magnetic.

I'm not sure I've ever seen a wedding movie that made me feel, the way Rachel Getting Married does, as if I wasn't just crashing the event but was part of the family.

There's a rehearsal dinner sequence that sprawls on for close to half an hour, and the speeches people make are so revealing, stirring up so many awkward and touching cross-currents among the gathered clans, that by the end of it I felt as if I'd known everyone in the room for years. That level of realism, as Robert Altman knew well, is captivating because it turns even the most microscopic interactions into drama, and that's the level that Demme is working on here. It helps that the script, by Jenny Lumet (Sidney's daughter), is a fully woven web of love, jealousy, and a host of enabling demons. Rachel Getting Married bears a notable similarity to Margot at the Wedding (which I liked), but this movie digs far deeper into the tangled psychology of family relationships. When Debra Winger shows up as the sisters' quasi-estranged mother (the parents are divorced), Winger, her beauty aged into a queenly grandeur, only multiplies the tension. The spectacle of this biracial, melting-pot wedding creates a fascinating frisson of its own—it's a vision of a new world. I wish that Demme, in the final act, hadn't let the wedding music, by Sister Carol East and Robyn Hitchcock (among others), take over his film. This much healing-by-'80s-hipster-taste is too much. But Rachel Getting Married is still a triumph for Demme—his best work since The Silence of the Lambs, and a movie that tingles with life.

*

The new Richard Linklater film, Me and Orson Welles, is an affectionate period-piece showbiz comedy set in 1937, when Welles, then 21, first blasted his way into the orbit of fame with his Mercury Theatre production of Julius Caesar. (It was the year before his infamous War of the Worlds broadcast.) There's one great reason to see the movie, and that's Christian McKay's performance as Welles. He looks exactly like him—the boy-man baby face rounded out with a little too much baby fat, the eyes that twinkle with all-knowing charm—and McKay, who has played Welles on stage, does an altogether uncanny impersonation of Welles the debonair egomaniac, who cut a swath through the Broadway world of stunned producers and leggy chorus girls. McKay gets that melting-butter voice to a T, and he makes the energy of Welles' genius more than irresistible—he makes it contagious.

I wish I could say the same for Me and Orson Welles. Linklater has framed the weeks of frantic rehearsal leading up to the premiere of Julius Caesar as the story of a naive young actor who talks his way into Welles' stock company, and Zac Efron, who plays this bushy-tailed rube, is such a genial blank on screen that when he woos the Mercury Theatre secretary (Claire Danes), we seem to have landed in the middle of one of Woody Allen's quaintest, most mediocre fables. Me and Orson Welles is always sweet, but except for McKay's performance, it has so little fire that Orson Welles would have wondered out loud what he was doing stuck in the middle of it.