Kalbirsohi.net

Psychobabble

• Rachel's Getting Married

• Film, Philosophy

• There is a difference between how we describe the mental life of others and how we describe our own mental lives. When we try to describe why someone did something we resort to what might be called “mind reading”, the process of extrapolating from our own mental lives (and our past experiences of others') to explain that of another. In contrast, we have full, unblemished, Presidential access to our own mental states; we are there, in charge, we know how it feels to be like this, to be in pain. Everyone's had the thought at some time or another: when you look at something green, do you see what I see when I look at something green? When you stub your toe, is it just as painful as when I stub mine? What’s it like to be in your head?

  Kym is out of rehab for the few days of her sister's wedding, how can we tell what's it like to be in her head? This is the issue around which Jonathan Demme's excellent film revolves, to the sound of constantly playing wedding musicians. Each member of the family tries to answer this question to some extent, each with their own limitations: Rachel accuses Kym of stealing her spotlight, of needing to be the centre of attention, an accusation that runs deep in the history of their relationship, their father worries constantly about where Kym's mind has taken her, their mother is forced to confront the question by Kym herself. The fact that these attempts at mind reading are incomplete, often inaccurate and always informed by our own desires and prejudices sets up the disparity between viewpoints that drives the film.

  Rachel's wedding is somewhere between lavish and homely, an eclectic mix of peoples, traditions, cultures that perhaps reflects a particular slice of liberal America that exists only in the writer’s mind. It should be an occasion of unbridled joy, but what wedding ever achieved such impossible standards? Instead tension lurks so close to the surface in the bride's family that the spikes of argument and accusation soon feel like the norm rather than a departure from it. The repercussions of an hitherto unspoken event from the past to some extent validates Rachel's grievances with Kym and goes a long way towards explaining everyone's neuroses.

  The fragility of Kym's own mental state is portrayed wonderfully by Anne Hathaway (I didn't think that I would be writing a sentence like that after The Devil Wears Prada!) She nails portraying the rollercoaster of emotions that Kym experiences. Rosemarie Dewitt plays Rachel as composed of equal parts bitchiness, condescending behaviour and sisterly love. Seeing complex female characters lead a film is always welcome, even more so when a director tries to examine the depth of their flaws.

  There are a few aspects of the film that I didn't like, the wedding itself was an overwhelming hodgepodge of cringeworthy moments, but then I've never really liked weddings. The inability to escape the music became as frustrating to me as it did to some of the other characters (I loved the scene where the musicians were rather angrily told to knock it off). However, on the whole I found this to be a surprising, interesting, complicated, psychologically real film. We need more like it.

  P.S. Demme's previous work on The Silence of the Lambs suggests that he has given more thought to the problems that the psychological states of others cause us better than most film directors.

• One Response to “Rachel's Getting Married”

  1. themes from kalbir says:

     October 4, 2009 at 5:56 pm

     [...] does the film Rachel’s Getting Married which I talked about in a similar [...]

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