Film is all about appearances.  While it does rely heavily on sound, no matter how a movie sounds, it still needs to resemble something coherent and consistent to matter.  While there’s a great deal of movies that are flawed from the conception stage onward, a strong, unwavering visual concept can go a long way.  Take, for example, Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married.  The story is dead simple:  Recovering drug addict Kym (Anne Hathaway) leaves rehab to attend her sister Rachel’s wedding.  The visual hook?  The whole thing is presented as though it’s someone’s home movies.  It’s a far cry from a glossy epic with sweeping crane shots; it even looks rough compared to The Wrestler.  But it absolutely draws the audience in.

The strength of the movie is that it seldom looks scripted.  And even when it does, it’s not performed that way.  The performances are far and away the best thing Rachel Getting Married has going for it.  Nar-Anon meetings look almost as though they just sent a cameraman and a handful of actors to the real deal, rehearsal dinner speeches look very much off-the-cuff, and the most raw emotional scenes look painfully legitimate.

The sense of handycam realism is assisted by the fact that a handful of characters are actually videotaping the whole thing.  Whether those cameras are props or actually shooting isn’t always easy to tell, but that’s not really important.  It makes the setting absolutely real.  Unfortunately, the DIY presentation is the film’s biggest weakness.  While it does capture some amazing performances by nearly anyone with more than a paragraph of dialogue, it too frequently lacks the sort of cohesion one would expect from a movie; even one edited on someone’s laptop.  While I can forgive the handheld shaky-cam as much as it typically bothers me, the movie is at least 10-15 minutes too long and loses it’s focus towards the end.

The appearance of spontaneity, however, does propel the story, and to say it turns the typical wedding movie on it’s head is an understatement.  It’s by no means a comedy, there’s no predictable plot turns, and it denies the audience full closure just as much as it denies the characters the same thing.

Anne Hathaway deserves an Academy Award for her performance, and it earns major points for making zero concessions in terms of realism.  And perhaps most importantly, even the most intense scenes don’t result in overacting or hamming.  But the final half-hour really should have been a final 15 minutes.  It’s a flawed film that can be afforded a lot of grace by virtue of it’s cast, but it’s still not quite what it could have been.

Verdict: B