A Vast Conspiracy of Shit

Rachel Getting Married sucked in a similar way to Before the Devil Knows You're Dead last year - a brilliant old filmmaker tries to do something "innovative" (or in the case of Rachel - mimicking the better Dogme films) and ends up revealing how far removed from "real" people you become after living a life as an acclaimed artist. I went to 4 weddings last year and in none of them do I remember big group discussions of seating arrangements in front of all, or five guys running around at all times with instruments playing, or the wedding deciding to do an Indian costume theme. These are big, bold, phony choices if you ask me - choices which would be mocked or at the very least questioned by the attendees. Rachel irrationally flips out over the color of her Sari - when it would make much more sense for her to irrationally flip out over the fact that she is wearing a Sari - when they're supposed to be Jews from Conneticut!

What is offensive - as discussed with Phil after the film - is not the film itself but the systemic breakdown of rooting this crap out and calling it what it is - immature writing - one could call it writing-as-catharsis - the type of stuff you read in a college freshman creative writing class coupled with SUPER indulgent acting and lazy, cheap filmmaking. But here is Ebert's positive "review" of the film and if the rumors are correct, I'm sure Hathaway will win an award for uglying herself up and letting camera record her going pee.

But you can't fool me. Especially with all this verite - actors and directors like this raw look and feel because the camera catches so much - it can really get up in there and you can shoot fast and keep going and really let loose. But what you forget is that cinema is artifice and we don't go to see "the real." Because the "real," in this case, reveals too much. Hathaway is no addict. Her smooth, pretty face, hasn't suffered years of drug abuse and the pain of manslaughter. No, that is a face pampered with the most expensive herbal moisturizer and the best spa treatments Hollywood can afford its young starlet. And her "father" in the movie is clearly gay. No father I know shakes his hands and starts crying at the first sign of his daughters yelling at one another. Sorry, buster.

The saving grace of the movie is Rachel, an actress named Dewitt, who is fascinating to watch and throughout the film I found myself going over the rolodex in my brain trying to place her. I couldn't tell if I had seen her in some other movie or I actually knew her in real life. But let me say one thing about casting - Sidney and Rachel are not a couple. They do not look the part. Save the stupid liberal comment - it's not because of race - I'm a goddamn mutt child myself. But I know couples and couples look "right" together. Couples are not a political formula or some vision of an integrated post-racial America. Couples are still couples - and they tend to sync up visually. These two did not. If I took nine pictures of real couples and tossed in a picture of Sydney and Rachel from this movie and offered up real money to people who could identify the fake couple...I'd bet real people could pick them out 75% of the time. But I doubt if any real movie reviewer would say such a thing - they have jobs and reputation to think about - and the only thing as harmful as actually being racist or bigoted, is giving others the ammunition to accuse you of it.