Rachel Getting Married is supposed to be a story about a girl's challenge in dealing with the fact her family is moving on with their individual lives while she has to deal with sobriety after getting out of rehab. This happens just as her sister Rachel is getting married. Hence the title. This may have been an acting tour de force for a young Anne Hathaway but unfortunately it was with a poorly cooked script that has zero character development and does nothing to make us like the characters in it. Screen writing 101 tells that you must have the characters do or show something that makes us like them so we can get behind them and cheer for them as they grow throughout the story. If you miss this very important step, you have an audience that is disconnected and does not care about the characters. If the audience does not care, why are you making the movie?Jonathan Demme obviously had a ton of favors to repay when he cast this nag as each scene is filled to overflowing with actors, and non- actors who are delivering lines that do nothing to move the story forward. The Wedding Rehearsal Dinner scene is painful to endure as actor after actor gets up to deliver another inane monologue that is useless. Demme repaid everyone of these non-actors with a part in this film to the detriment of the movie and at the expense of the audience. He also let the scenes run waaaaaaay too long and seemed to not know when to get out of each one. This is a huge mistake and something you expect from much less experienced directors.

I don't write reviews often but I feel compelled to write one for this movie because I loved it and I hated it. I loved how much thought had been put into each of the characters. There was a depth to each one of them and many of them were mysterious, causing you to feel like you wanted to know so much more about them. This of course is partly down to the acting. What a great cast! Anne Hathaway is brilliant in the role of Kym, probably the most convincing I have seen her. Some reviews I've read have said that she plays a very unlikable character but I disagree. If you follow the film you actually understand a lot about why she is the way she is and I felt a lot of empathy for her. Debra Winger is fantastic as the distant mother, it makes you want to kick her! The guy who plays Kieran also did a great job as a very likable character. I wish we could see more movies where the characters are this real and fascinating. Despite all of this I just couldn't get over the things that let this movie down. First of all the music throughout the movie was annoying most of the time, mainly because of the shrill violin. Perhaps this was done on purpose, if that's the case it certainly works but it makes the movie harder to watch. Also some of the scenes are unnecessarily drawn out. I would have much preferred finding out more about the characters instead. I also found the ending unsatisfactory. Over all, I don't regret having watched this movie. If you like movies that look at the rawness of relationships with in-depth character study you will enjoy it but, you may not love it.

Hard to believe that it's been five years since Jonathan Demme's last full-length fiction film, now available for streaming on Amazon Prime. This time around, we were struck by how powerful and affecting the ensemble scenes are—the rehearsal dinner, the ceremony itself, even the much-maligned dishwasher-loading contest. These sequences feel like a kind of virtual reality in which we're not just emotionally engaged as spectators but almost physically present as participants. They were so effective, in fact, that the scenes that took place in less crowded rooms and explored the conflict between the sisters—serene bride-to-be Rachel and shattered, attention-hungry Kym—started to seem like a distraction, even though the script was just about perfect (also hard to believe this was Jenny Lumet's first produced screenplay) and the performances could hardly have been better. Ever since "Something Wild," Demme's been crazy for world music and multiculture, and in "Rachel…" every time you look around, somebody's plucking on an oud or sawing out a modal tune on a fiddle. Loved it! (Also loved the scene where Anna Deavere Smith tells them to knock it off.) Didn't mind the twitchy, crazed-wedding-videographer-in-everyone's-face camera-work. Clearly the dancing and festivating goes on for quite a while (though be honest now, what's a wedding reception without a samba troupe and break dancing?); maybe JD felt we had to experience a bit of celebratory burnout before the subdued, melancholy tone of the final scenes. The boho excesses of Rachel's family and the overstuffed production may give snarks and quibblers a lot to complain about, but all in all "Rachel…" is a brilliant, soulful film that should give you as much pleasure to remember as it does to experience.

10. Director Demme shot this as if for TV, with an emphasis on close-ups that reveal way more than necessary of Bill Irwin's thinning hair and Anne Hathaway's gums. Close-ups are used as exclamation points on the big screen, which makes this movie all exclamation points. 9. Adding injury to insult, Demme also unwisely used a hand-held camera, which left me vaguely sea-sick, and failed to create what he was apparently aiming for-- a documentary feel. Documentaries have to be about reality; nothing in this movie feels real or honest.8. No subtlety. If there's a core problem, that's it. Everything is spelled out and heavy-handed. Hathaway has bobbed hair that looks like it was chewed off (read: dysfunction). She inexpertly smokes cigarettes (Hollywood's tired way of signaling a troubled or bad character)-- cigarettes which never burn down. No butts for Ms. Hathaway, only long slim white cigarettes as props for her. She is also the only smoker in a film crowded with unnecessary characters. Her character, "Kym," is the center of the movie, and she may be the most relentlessly self-indulgent, self-pitying character since Mildred Pierce's daughter, Veda. Not a character to build a movie on.7. Every single scene, without exception, is too long. The wedding toasts seem endless, as do the AA meetings. Worst: more than 5 minutes devoted to loading a dishwasher-- a contest between groom and future father-in-law. Five minutes. Seriously. I timed it. 6. No one is likable. Rachel comes closest (Rosemary Dewitt), but even she is alternately strident and sentimental-- those are the movie's two notes, and it reels between them without warning. Rachel also suffers for having zero chemistry with her groom, played by Tunde Adebimpe, who is given no distinct character to limn.5. Adebimpe is only one of many black characters who are good-natured, smiling ciphers (see Martin Yu's perceptive review about the cast). The cast is preposterously post-racial, yet presents African- Americans with the same benign attitude that we used to get in minstrel shows.4. The dialog is largely inaudible, and the whole movie depends on speeches. Nothing is advanced visually, except in reaction shots. 3. Horrible nonstop folk/world music. There is one scene with credible jazz combo, but it's not worth waiting for. 2. "I'm pregnant." That line is dropped like a bomb into a scene, allowing everybody to emote yet more, and Veda-- I mean "Kym" to launch into yet another strident, self-pitying attack on her family. 1. It's the kitchen-sink school of drama. Besides unexpected pregnancy, the movie drags in drug addiction, alcoholism, sibling hatred, divorce, anorexia, sexual molestation, and two car accidents, one of which kills a child. The only thing missing is racism, and that would actually have been a breath of honesty in this multi-kulti mess.