rachel getting married
I saw Rachel Getting Married tonight. The basic premise here is a young woman who has been in and out from rehab for the past 10 years returns home for the weekend for her sister's wedding. There's really not all that much story, although a ton of back story that they only drop subtle hints at as the film progresses. Its really two separate films merged together. There's the wedding & the preparation leading up to it, but then there's the tormented, dysfunctional family interactions that occur. The wedding is about as bizarre of a movie wedding that I've ever seen. For reasons which are never explained, they go with this Indian (as in the country) motif, even though no one in the film is Indian, no one has ever been to India, no one has plans to go to India, and no one has any background that even remotely is tied to India. So the wedding aspect was just plain weird, and felt like some cheap gimmick. The other half of the film is really dark comedy, verging on depressing. The acting is fairly decent, and the character interactions are setup to produce the most conflict imaginable. A daughter who was a junkie and ended up accidentally killing her younger brother. A mother who has intentionally emotionally detatched herself from the rest of her family. A father who keeps trying to fix everything. Overall, it was an ok film, however I'm really not sure why its received so much critical acclaim.