Rachel Getting Married: A

Anne Hathaway, eyes popped wide, and with hair slashed in a frazzled bob, gives a wide-awake performance that is the centerpiece of Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married—a film not just with clarity and emotional richness, but also a canny perceptiveness into familial politics. Shot by cinematographer Declan Quinn as another of the myriad ShakyCam dramas, the director and his writer Jenny Lumet (who has created perhaps the richest of all of 2008’s intellectual properties) nonetheless transcend an old trick in order to bring to the screen a film of vital curiosity and life. As Kym, the recovering addict come to see her sister, Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) get married to Sydney (Tunde Adebimpe), Hathaway may remain trapped in her characteristic speech patterns, but she wires you into her every synaptic urge: you hate her, at first, for crashing the party, and then you begin to understand her and her clawing, nattering self-absorption, and then you hate her a little more. But empathy isn't character-exclusive—so clever in the telling is the film that even the smallest of parts bustles with humanity. And when Debra Winger shows up in a volcanic cameo as the sisters’ mom, the screen practically tears itself apart. The movies are rarely used for such revelation as that on display in Demme’s movie; and even more rarely does it hook the audience so completely onto its wavelength of spare inquisition. The final scenes devolve a bit but it’s a small price to pay for such a viewing experience. Rachel Getting Married isn’t the most aesthetically adventurous film of the year, but it may well be the most exciting—and it tingles with life, love, drama, sisterhood, and everything in between.