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Rachel Getting Married is not perfect, but neither are the characters that inhabit its cinematic world. Despite its overabundance and sometimes out of place characters, it is rare to find a Hollywood film that feels this real as of late, which is thanks to several components of the film. The excellent direction from Jonathan Demme, cinematography of Declan Quinn, some nicely executed lines from writer Jenny Lumet, and some great moments from actresses Rosemarie DeWitt and Anne Hathaway.

After a decade in rehab, Hathaway’s Kym comes home to her sister Rachel’s (DeWitt) wedding. The wedding is, of course, at the home of Kym’s family and for some reason all the people working on the wedding are almost always present there. Hence, the soundtrack of the film is filled with clanging dishes, scurrying feet, homemade music and voices coming from all around; this audio mixed with the speeded dialogue of Kym and the shaky hand held documentary style of cinematographer Quinn equates to a tense atmosphere that puts the audience square in the mind of antihero Kym. This can be a bit much a times (I noticed members of my screening audience physically panicked, crying, and overwhelmed a good majority of the time), but if it were not for the empathy for Kym generated from the cinematography, it would be hard to take her character’s plight seriously. Without said empathy, the character of Kym may have fallen into a caricature of an addict due to the hit or miss performance from Hathaway. The cinematography and direction are what contextualize, and make work, the character of Kym.

Writer Lumet puts in some much needed downtime and humor to the film to give the audience a quick distraction from the chaos and trauma at hand, most notably the wedding reception which does go on a bit long, but ultimately works as a celebration for the hard life Kym’s family has endured. Most members of Kym and Rachel’s family turn out stellar performances including Rachel’s husband Sydney (Tunde Adebimpe) whose innocence and strength seems profound in the face of all the tension building in the film. On the downside, Debra Winger as Kym and Rachel’s mother seems a bit out of place. This film is unpolished, gritty, and very real: Winger, generally to her credit, is none of these things and doesn’t seem to adapt to Demme’s guerilla style of filmmaking.

All in all, Rachel Getting Married becomes an extraordinary and unique piece of art once you can look past its flaws and love it for what it is, and therein lies the moral of this gritty cinematic work.