More clinical tales, or stories of immersion in personal instability or growth
Girl, Interrupted (1999), Thirteen (2003), White Oleander (2002), Rachel Getting Married (2008)
[This was edited mainly for errors, 2/22/12 and 7/31/12. Edit 7/30/13.]
Prefatory note
A quickie note: my discussion of Marnie in Part 1, which stepped into psychological discussion and terminology (including “borderline personality” relationship), made reference to one 1994 study in what was meant to be a helpful way that also suggested I knew what I was talking about. But it may have seemed too dense, opaque, tossed-off. So, for something you might find a little clearer (perhaps), try:
“The most striking feature of the borderline family is that the mechanisms of splitting and projective identification are not displayed simply by an individual but pervade the parent-child subsystem,” the latter being a subsystem because the borderline family, as the authors explain in the previous paragraph, typically encompasses three generations. Later in the paragraph, the authors say, “This splitting distorts the family’s perception of reality in such a way as to cause them to experience both internal and external events or issues as either ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ ‘black’ or ‘white.’” From Craig A. Everett and Sandra S. Volgy, “Borderline Disorders: Family Assessment and Treatment,” in Froma Walsh and Carol Anderson, editors, Chronic Disorders and the Family (New York: The Haworth Press, 1988), 55.
Also, as it turns out, my look at the final movie, Black Swan, has to be saved for a third blog installment.
1. A “girlie” Cuckoo’s Nest, and then some: Girl, Interrupted (1999)
[Comment not provided; unable to re-view movie—last saw it years ago. This is too bad, because the heroine of the story, which I understand is nonfiction, and played by Winona Ryder, was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.]
2. A Primal Scream version of early-teen’s rough transition: Thirteen (2003)
I saw this movie for the first time in 2007, and I watched it several times and was electrified by it. I eventually wrote the first version of the review below, which I’ve edited for this version. I was moved by the movie almost to being unbearably shaken by the end, partly (I think) because I had lived through a variety of its story, when a relative went through a few-year phase of seismic druggie/delinquent changes that shook the family as Evan Rachel Wood’s character Tracy Freeland does her own family in this film. (My relative did turn herself around and go to college and eventually raise a family.)
Also in 2007, I was (unwittingly) finishing my several-year involvement with support group activities, with all the immersion in troubled-female business that entailed, so I perhaps was more vulnerable to the kind of shaken sympathy I had for this film. Since then, cataclysmic changes in my life—and the change for the more paranoid in American society as effected by the shocks of the 2008-09 financial crisis and sequelae—may temper my view of this film (I hope not changing it to the curmudgeonly) if I saw it again. And certainly fewer young American families, awash in the middle class shallow-optimism and denial that are arguably brought on by the slow financial recovery, may find Thirteen to be less their cup of tea than apparently found it in 2003.
One thing is probably as true now as in 2003: however much the statistically minded (and bureaucratically aloof) would say this movie’s story “is not how it is with everyone, or many kids at all,” the point should be forcefully made that, sometimes, a phenomenological look at just how bad it can get is more to the point than barfed-up pieties based on statistics. Show us the Jimi Hendrix conflagration, and then maybe we can talk about the issue more soberly, once we’re stirred into caring.
Causes for pause four years ago; but movie packs a wallop
When I first saw this movie, it was approaching four years after it had been released. In 2007, I remembered when the ads for it when it was in theaters in 2003, and in 2007 I was in the middle of dealing with support-group issues amid people some of whose behavior was reminiscent of some of the people in this movie. But all I saw were the sketchy ads and the rather interesting articles in relation to the movie, and I felt the movie might be on the pretentious side.
One thing in particular that gave me pause was that one of the lead actresses, Nikki Reed, who was also one of the writers of the movie, was all of about 14 when the movie was made, and it was about experiences of hers from shortly before in her life (when she was about 12-13). That made me hesitant to see it, I think; but I’m not sure why I held off for a number of years. I also recall the news of Holly Hunter being nominated for a supporting actress Oscar for her role in the film, which piqued my interest a bit in the film. But circumstances, my priorities, my taste, and/or whatever else intervened, and I only semi-casually picked up the film in a DVD rental in 2007.
This movie hit me like little else when I saw it. I saw it a number of times and eagerly watched or listened to the extras. A couple things in little doubt are that the movie does contain depictions among putative 13-year-olds that the rating system does not allow such an audience to see without a parent or guardian. The movie also affects you rather strongly, which is key to the various things, whether not approving or approving, that have been said about it.
I won’t recount the plot or give away the powerful climax to make a few comments. That the movie was partly written by a young woman who was about 14 at the time of filming (in 2002) is a source of its strength as well of its weakness. And the story in its bare outlines is nothing new: teens going to hell due to peer pressure, societal temptations, self-identity issues, etc. I wrote a story somewhat like this when I was all of 15, almost 35 years ago, called “Another Fallen Woman,” and it was partly inspired by what affected me as the grievous falling from a sort of youthful grace of a relative and probably others I knew.
The movie has a punch due to its quick, busy, semi-impressionistic recounting of the flow of life events of a 13-year-old “good girl” student who is turned into a rebel of sorts by a seductive peer at school, who is both edgy in a sort of newly-sexy/rebellious way and popular in a sense. And with the wide-eyed honesty of an un-judgmental witness in a teen who has “been there and been part of it,” the story presents its events with a tumultuous and un-reconsidered quality that reflects both the type of experience its recounts and a sort of amplification done out of a sort of moral lesson-making (that is, like the recovered alcoholic seeming to put his life of drunken debauchery in starker, more rueful terms than the facts may warrant).
Some (or most? all?) of the teen-decline behaviors are spot-on: the nightmarish bitchiness; the insane snobbery of the likes of, “I hate your store-brand food!”
Adults and technology helped condition the story
Of course, director Catherine Hardwicke rewrote and/or added to the story, and costar Holly Hunter tweaked some features of it. Probably the story had changes essential to it be made lest it seem too much the work of a callow person. (Hardwicke has also done production design in movies, which is why the color scheme of this one changes to the increasingly murky and lurid as it reaches its end, a technique interesting in its underscoring mood and atmosphere. I believe she also directed the first Twilight movie, which also had color manipulation or some similar high-tech production feature.)
The extras of the DVD are interesting for showing the enthusiasm and dynamism of what it took to make this movie; and its low-budget style and the vividness of its acting (which latter seems to reflect the crushingly short production schedule) add a certain veracity of so many middle class lives in this country: noisy action, questionable values-embracing at times, confusion or alternating between more banal and more noble actions, somewhat sordid living conditions, etc.
A technical note: the hand-held camera work sometimes was a little too disorienting to me, but that is just me; on the other hand, the director of photography handling the camera did well in capturing sometimes complex, multi-location action in the movie’s tight-budget-condensing way.
What moral resolution does this film give us?
As a work of obvious “popular art,” one asks how much a movie would be expected to offer a catharsis of a more noble sort than it would a sort of instigation of strong reaction. And what kind of catharsis suits what story? If we see teens going to pot (literally and figuratively) in a shockingly rapid and colorful way, what kind of resolution and deliverance from sorrow, anger, and whatever else do or should we expect? Is that what the movie should deliver?
One answer is that if the movie is meant to be a didactic work, something on the order of Sinclair Lewis decrying the injustices of meat-packing plants early in the twentieth century, or the morally pointed 1970s movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar, then all we would expect is for the movie to rub our nose in “what sad states our sisters and brothers are coming to,” leave us crying (or otherwise disturbed) at the story’s outcome, and then follow the exhortation, as one commenter in a Thirteen DVD extra earnestly says, “Parents, talk to your kids!” If this is all the movie is meant to do, then it succeeds on the simplistic level it thus operates on. And it also happens to be something you’d expect a 14-year-old to write about the depredations that she and her peers have fallen into.
Wood’s breakout role is movie’s main anchor
But this movie is a little more than that. It does stand up under multiple viewings, and one thing that makes it work is the consistently good performance of its other teenage star, Evan Rachel Wood, who of the two lead young women is the real actor. This movie, which won awards at the early-2003 Sundance festival, seems to have been her breakout role in major feature films. Since then she has appeared in films as varied as the Beatles celebration Across the Universe, the quirky comedy The King of California, the low-budget The Wrestler, and the Woody Allen film Whatever Works (I have seen all except the last). Nikki Reed, attractive enough in Thirteen, obviously shows her acting chops relative to Wood’s in that she’s appeared in few films of note (not like Wood), and has lately turned up in the movie ghetto of the Twilight franchise.
Wood’s performance in Thirteen—which various resources on the Web have suggested is reflective of her portraying deviant personalities she has seen and not of her own personality—is good in a way that has to be seen. The still photos of her may make her seem unremarkable, or emotionally a little flat, but her performance shows her to be one of those people who “photograph better in action than as a still.” And the climactic scene near the end of her being confronted by others—one of the few scenes that the tight schedule allowed a whole day of production on—has to be seen for you to appreciate Wood’s capability as an actress and what the movie as a whole has to say.
Thus, I would sum that it could be debated whether the movie is more—though with unusual punch—a sort of ABC Afterschool Special (you might remember those from the 1970s; the 2002 film White Oleander, looked at below, seems like this too). Or maybe it’s a sort of minor tragedy. But whether it offers a strong, if crude catharsis that shocks you into thinking more about our teens’ visions and destinies, or is simply a sort of folk song played with loud fuzz guitar—impressively noisy, but as shallow as it is dense with sensations. Or maybe it is the work of a teen who knows a little more than the insulting assessment made by adults, “All youth knows is youth”—that is, it knows the pain and cause for moral anguish that materialistic and hedonistic American teens can encounter—but it doesn’t know enough to show what its steered-wrong heroine Tracy Freeland would become if she started to look at her condition and become more healthy in herself and in her relations with family.
What kind of depth does the movie offer into troubled personality?
I think a critical remark that I read about it is that it doesn’t look at enough of the depth of its main character(s). It certainly shows enough of the symptoms of distress, and it parades an awfully busy collection of them. Well, in real life, sometimes that’s all many parents seem to become aware of—hopefully, not before it’s too late. Maybe when it comes to teens, this is part of the point: the only way we know something is wrong is by seeing the flash, and feeling the pain, of excessive behavior.
Of course, in the old days, people would have said “it’s just a phase she’s going through.” As it turns out, the fact that young lives going through a drastic downturn are really just going through a painful “detour” has been acknowledged by psychologists for decades. One of Freud’s disciples, Erik H. Erikson—just to take an example from one of the more “classic” talk-therapy theorists—had a more optimistic view of humanity than did Freud; while Freud focused on determinism and blunt destiny arising from “accidents” in early life, Erikson focused on purpose or aimed-for destiny and healthy phases of life. Here are a few things Erikson had to say in general terms, which maybe can stand for what Tracy Freeland may exemplify, manifestation of a sort of borderline personality:
“Young patients can be violent or depressed, delinquent or withdrawn, but theirs is an acute and possibly passing crisis rather than a breakdown of the kind which tends to commit a patient to all the malignant implications of a fatalistic diagnosis.” (Erik H. Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis [New York
And: “...where role confusion joins a hopelessness of long standing, delinquency and ‘borderline’ psychotic episodes are not uncommon.” (pp. 131-32) And: “What under prejudiced scrutiny may appear to be the onset of a neurosis often is only an aggravated crisis which might prove to be self-liquidating and even, in fact, contributive to the process of identity formation.” (p. 163)
This movie is detailed enough that it even looks at the phenomenon of cutting, which is seen in borderline personalities. Tracy
Last notes
I’m a little dissatisfied with the movie’s very ending. In a sort of poetic coda, Tracy Tracy
But at least if you wanted a movie to show you just how sensationally badly American teens can hurt, and how they might end up dealing with their troubled sense through sex, drugs, petty crime, rudeness, and so on, this movie does it with a riot of not only eye-opening behavior, but a Mardi Gras variability in color, jazzy kinesis from a hand-held camera, and easily affecting music.
Thirteen takeaway: lurid story of teen’s descent into delinquency, sexual experimentation, and drug use, at the insidious behest of a charismatic friend, depicts a certain kind of middle-class tragedy made vivid by a good actress’s performance. Lesson? Parents could communicate with their children more sensitively, perhaps.
3. A young woman’s growth despite a deviant mother: White Oleander (2002)
I won’t comment too much on this movie here; I should re-view it again, but have seen it several times. It’s sui generis in a way; based on an apparently interesting novel that I haven’t read, it’s a complicated story boiled down into movie form in a series of episodes, showing how a young woman grows up despite the attempted (and actual) influence of her mother, a beautiful artist (and, it turns out, criminal unafraid of her antisocial act—murdering an unfaithful boyfriend—which gives her a sort of Nietzschean edge). This movie, like Black Swan, seems to divide critics by age group, at least to judge from a look at Leonard Maltin’s review versus the take in the VideoHound yearly compendium of reviews; Maltin likes it better than VideoHound, and I would agree with him.
Michelle Pfeiffer plays the mother; Alison Lohman (as Astrid) plays the daughter, and it is really her film. As the movie progresses through Astrid’s being lodged in various foster homes with an occasional stay in a sort of juvenile holding center, Astrid (and Lohman) is really the one who makes us care about this story, with its seemingly disjointed episodes. The longest, and first, foster-home episode has Robin Wright Penn as a born-again but trashy mother housing a number of foster kids. Here, Astrid’s sexual involvement with Penn’s live-in boyfriend leads to a blowup that preludes Astrid’s placement with a suicidal stay-at-home wife (played by Renee Zellweger) of a traveling actor; and later, Astrid’s placement choice of a tacky female Russian street hustler of sorts who sells clothes scavenged from garbage, with the aid of a number of seemingly homeless young women. (This loosely summarizes Astrid’s series of sad, random versions of home.)
The story may seem like something out of the old TV-movie series ABC Afterschool Special, and it does have something of that flavor.
Lohman, whose major breakout role this was, is what makes the movie worth watching (in addition to the overall drama, which some might find too shallow or cursory in some ways). Through stylized shots (the movie may annoy with its fashion-mag way of depicting many of the main actresses), Lohman’s Astrid grows from a seemingly impressionable girl, who has artistic aspirations of her own, to an apparently increasingly crusty and jaded older young woman, who reacts with mixed signals at first to the entreaties of a young orphan male (who practices comics-type art) who takes a liking to her (they later become a couple).
Near the movie’s end, Astrid is dressed in Goth girl style, actually rather shocking given Lohman’s usual appearance; and at this point she is suitably hard in questioning her mother in the last of the series of rich prison conversations (with Astrid increasingly mature through them) that alternate with scenes of Astrid’s episodes of foster-home adventures. In this last conversation, Astrid has been led by her mother’s attorney to try to work up an agreement with her mother to lie in court so that her mother’s sentence may be shortened, or the like.
After the showdown-type conversation between the two, with Astrid compromising to say she’ll lie for her mother, Astrid later finds in court that her mother has agreed to stick with the longer sentence, in the process having obviated Astrid’s testifying on her behalf. Pfeiffer’s character is led off to her cell, and Astrid is free to pursue her life as an independent; with reuniting with the male who has courted her, she becomes an apparently balanced (and attractively styled) adult who honors her mother in her own artwork.
Lohman was one of the actresses who became a noteworthy up-and-comer around 2002-03, in the wake of 9/11, along with Evan Rachel Wood, Lindsay Lohan, and several others, that made movie fans like me wonder, Is one of these women going to be the next Meryl Streep? Lohman is somewhere between very pretty and beautiful, and is short (camera angles often hide this). She can handle changes in personality from almost-waif-like girl to Gothic beast in White Oleander, which acting feat apparently recommended her to those who cast her in the interesting Matchstick Men, an overlooked 2003 film directed by Ridley Scott.
In Matchstick Men, a visually stylized (and richly sound-edited) story of con artists, Lohman again plays a woman who at first seems younger than the actress’s years; this movie’s main character Roy—played (with your patience for his character's quirks decreasing with repeated viewings) by Nicolas Cage—thinks her character, Angela, is his long-lost daughter. One way this movie is interesting is that it shows actors playing at being actors—to the extent they play temporary con-artist roles. Lohman appears in Matchstick Men’s coda as a supposed young adult (with an ugly hairdo), though this age transformation is less effective, I think, than in White Oleander. While Cage’s performance may grow thin with repeated viewings, only Lohman’s performance and that of the restlessly hip Sam Rockwell (as Roy
In short, with these two movies, Lohman seemed like an actress quite capable of nailing a variety of young-female personality styles. She can portray stark anger and (in other circumstances) bitchiness, yet it often seems like Lohman in general is a little too nice for this, and (sometimes) has to press herself to do it.
The only other movie I’ve seen Lohman in (at least where she had a major role) was Drag Me to Hell (2009), Sam Raimi’s sometimes self-parodying, un-subtle horror movie [I've also seen Where the Truth Lies (2005), on which I hope to have a review soon]. Here Lohman was cast to play an inveterately nice young woman (with an ambitious streak as a bank employee); her nice-woman mannerisms, to me, were consistent with her personality in roles from years before. Thus, as an actress it seems her ability is generally limited to that sort of thing—a nice young woman. It could be argued that as Drag Me to Hell showed, Lohman is like Shelley Duvall (as shown in The Shining) and Tippi Hedren (as shown in The Birds): an actress of some solid appeal but with (arguably) limited acting range, who can perform up to snuff in a horror film if leaned on (rather mercilessly) by its director.
In White Oleander, she plays the daughter of a Scandinavian woman, and accordingly her eyebrows are colored blond in some scenes (but, continuity problem! Lohman’s dark eyebrows are seen in other scenes). (Lohman, her hair previously cut very short for a previous movie production, wears wigs through this movie.)
This is an interesting, rather touching story, with Lohman the main attraction and doing what I would call a solidly nice job with a demanding part. But whether this movie tells you a lot of the ins and outs of such a young woman’s odyssey is open to question. Definitely worth a look in this series of films I’m discussing, but not your first choice.
White Oleander takeaway: a young woman’s foster-home odyssey while she is in the orbit of a demanding, rather conscience-lacking mother, is affectingly enough handled within the constraints of this movie, whose inevitable length may be too short to do justice to the book.
4. Mixed homecoming for a just-post-rehab substance abuser: Rachel Getting Married (2008)
This movie got good reviews when it came out; I think I first saw it on DVD in 2009. What struck me when I first saw it, and I think strikes me the same way now, is that what seems splendidly revealing and “real” in the cinema verite presentation of a wedding-weekend, variegated-ethnic-groups family drama wears a little thin on repeated viewing. That is, at first viewing, the family members of Kym Beckman, played by Anne Hathaway, seem to be reasonable (or understandable) enough in their reactions to her as “wet blanket” enrollee of a several-month rehab program (she has done nine months and will return for more). But on later viewing, they seem on occasion more cheap-spirited and not-complex-enough. Meanwhile, Hathaway does a great job—she is the only one deeply acting—as Kym in her newly puritanical quality as sober (to a fault, you could say), accountability-seeking, and mourning.
Rachel, played by Rosemarie DeWitt, is getting married to her boyfriend Sidney Williams (Black; played with quiet humor by musician Tunde Adebimpe), from whom she turns out to be pregnant, and a slew of people—friends, family, others—are to be at the non-traditional wedding, along with a casual group of rather-exotic-sounding musicians practicing inside and outside the house throughout the weekend, like a bunch of wandering, Middle Eastern-flavored troubadours who stopped by to hang out. This is (along with being a typical wedding where just about any attendee can fairly ask, “Who are some of these people?”) very much a New York metro-area type scene, with mixed marriages and all sorts of ethnicities (in terms of cultural activities, whatever else) congregating and mutually celebrating with liberal ease. (Bill Irwin, as Rachel and Kym’s father Paul, I think is miscast, as he admits—in a DVD extra—to suspecting when first offered the role; he seems to me a little wimpy to be the father of such a family, but as an actor he seems a great sort to be colorfully effusing on a New York stage.)
As you might guess, the movie presents a milieu and set of people (with their values) that are not to all tastes, but even in this it exemplifies how, when you treat the issue of “the recovering substance abuser in our midst,” such a person’s problem can happen in all families, and one key to having some ameliorative influence in the matter—as a relative, lay helper, whatever—is to know how to, or try to, build bridges between you and the “miscreant.” Taking a stand on who you will or will not relate to, or endlessly pointing a finger, does not help.
This movie, with planning and such going on well over a year before it was filmed in 2007, embodies a fairly casual filming style similar to that specialized in by Francis Coppola, of having actors actually live the situation they are also supposed to act (they are thrown in with a host of others, and to a good extent expected to respond naturalistically to the event at hand). (This is actors having to be real people at turns, unlike movies in which actors may play at being actors, e.g., in depicting con men.)
So a variety of viewers can take in this movie, enjoy the (sometimes distracting) hand-held camera casualness (and appreciate the editing that captures good nexuses—or nexi?—of drama), and see what they think: does this movie speak to them about what it is like to deal with a self-recognizing substance abuser in the family?
I think the script may be a bit naïve in how it captures the long-term family emotional complexity, a complexity compounded in the short term for occurring on the weekend of a big wedding, what is supposed to be a happy time—an event that yet always carries its anxieties (and dredging up family resentments/old issues). Rosemarie DeWitt, I think, disappoints me more than some of the other actors, because while she depicts the happy bride-to-be—cheerful with Kym on the latter’s arrival when they peal with playful sister talk—and later talks alone with her birth mother, played by Debra Winger (who is adequate but in a small role), she seems fine. But sometimes in facing off with Kym with the latter’s bringing up her own coming-to-terms issues, DeWitt’s Rachel can seem shallow and even a bit self-absorbed in her own way (even if it is her wedding weekend). I would think that sisters who otherwise would have been pretty close would mean that Rachel would show more complex emotions than DeWitt does here, even when she is trying to fend off Kym’s dour, sometimes bitchy “intrusions” on the wedding weekend with her 12-Step agenda.
One nice paradox is, about midway through the movie, Kym’s scorning Rachel for the latter’s putatively dry and remote understanding of psychological issues with her obtaining an advanced degree in this field, while Kym actually lives febrile psychological issues. I appreciate this in more ways than you might imagine.
Hathaway, of course, is the central attraction of the film, regarding her character and in her burden as an actress. Hathaway, I’ve thought, is attractive, but her dark eyes are big, like two oversized headlights; her mouth can seem too big when open; and she has a small nose. Her face is as if someone wanted to sculpt a really beautiful face, and got interrupted (by the phone or something), and never finished. But, with any notable actress, whatever career entrée her looks give her, her emotional wealth is key. The edginess of Kym starts with her straight, black, hedgecutter-chopped hair, looking like a big red slash across the face, as if she would say “I dare you to question my appearance.” In short, Kym starts as someone from whom you know you expect some kind of trouble, but don’t know precisely what pyrotechnics you’ll get.
With Kym, Hathaway maybe sometimes comes on a little strong with her turns at sour self-centeredness; sometimes in her flat-voiced, intently rapid talking (I’ve seen Hathaway shows flashes of this even in such a goofy movie as the ~2009 Get Smart), she sounds like “a mouthy pain in the ass, New Jersey subtype.” The fictional family appears to be (at least partly) Jewish, and while Hathaway gives glimmers of (when disagreeable) some Jewish-shrew style, I didn’t find her to be thoroughgoingly this way. (I’m quite familiar with the varieties of Jewish personal style and manners, both because of my long experience in the New York area publishing world and, more fun, because of my time at my college, GWU—or “GW”—which visiting speaker—and famous Yippie—Abbie Hoffman in about 1984 jokingly—and with the largely Jewish audience’s ready sympathy—referred to as “Jew Double-Jew.” GW had a large commuter segment to its student population, but the population of its dorm system was about 60 percent Jewish at that time. Don’t know where it stands now.)
While I’ve never attended an AA meeting (though some of its ritual usages turned up in less-rigorous support groups I did attend), the AA and rehab subculture (as well as other recovering-addict requirements) seems well represented in this movie: for instance, the undignified spectacle of peeing in a cup for tests; and the rap-group meetings, whose depictions seem surprisingly on target. Among the more sober drama, a scene in a hair salon, when Rachel overhears some inadvertently revealed, preposterous assertions Kym had made years before in a rap group context, is well staged, played, and edited.
Fun scenes also lighten the mood, like a dishwasher-loading contest between Rachel’s father and his son-in-law-to-be. More emotional richness comes with a later scene where Rachel bathes Kym on her wedding morning after Kym has come home disheveled and wounded by a car accident; this is touching and, per the proper taste, quietly handled. It is just right for the overall arc of the drama.
The firefights of family quarrels are to be seen, and are affecting; and the movie balances things out with an extended musical sequence with the wedding brood partying to a variety of musicians after the unusual ceremony. Kym punctuates this with occasional brooding about one central feature of her “fierce inventory of self” and so on that are integral to 12-Step self-discipline, the fact that she accidentally killed a younger brother whom she was baby-sitting, when she was driving him home and lost control of a car. She strikes me as, while needing to mourn this event and take responsibility for herself, to dwell on it a little too much (sometimes, of course, in confrontations with family members).
One scene, a pre-wedding-day rehearsal dinner, in which each person gets a turn at the microphone to toast Rachel and Sidney vis-à-vis their coming nuptials, at her turn Kym rather self-indulgently takes the opportunity to do what she probably feels is appropriate, a sort of coming-to-terms (in AA “fierce inventory” style) with what she owes her sister, including a straight apology, and she rambles a little long, with the camera showing all the bored, or embarrassed, faces (no one spares such an ashen reception). I don’t know but what this is a bit overdone. Maybe it was meant to be an episode of the kind of when-needed droll humor that seems intrinsic to the complex topic of this film; but it seems to end up lapsing into patience-trying banality, both as an artistic depiction and as seeming to overdraw Kym’s own lapse in taste. Maybe I’m wrong on this.
This movie, with its mainly tracing an event typified by joie de vivre, of course ultimately addresses—here in braided form—both quintessential emotional veins of family life: the sad/angry and the joyous-and-forgiving. A lot of this story is to be seen to be appreciated. You might leave it feeling, “Cool, but I don’t know if I would see it again,” but it’s a good portrait of the way an individual’s substance abuse can be like soot in the engine of a privileged family.
Rachel Getting Married takeaway: sister comes home from heavy-duty rehab to attend older sister’s wedding, and the seemingly spontaneous movie richly displays clashing emotional agendas of (1) a “miscreant’s” need to establish accountability, mourn, and begin to make amends and (2) the prerogatives of those embracing a joyous, forward-looking occasion.
Part 3, to come: Black Swan (2010): A ballerina’s breakdown/breakthrough with a sop for Joey Beer Ball
New movie theme entries to follow:
Movie break: Win Win (2011), Tom McCarthy's pleasant look at a lawyer's life
Served. Witnessed. Have a Nice Day: The Coen brothers’ edifying portrayal of practicing lawyers in their movies
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