A Torte
Written: Mar 02 '09 (Updated Mar 04 '09)
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: Warm interracial & interclass harmony.
Cons: Unsteady camera, but then that's the nature of visual experience at a large gathering.
The Bottom Line: If you can handle a warm wedding and a psychological crisis in the same move, go for it.
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| topreviewerman's Full Review: Rachel Getting Married |
I personally don't like large gatherings—such as this movie portrays to a fault—so I subtracted a star for the visceral discomfort of the roving camera, then added it back for the cute pun involving the title. Rachel Getting Married. When it was discovered the best man Kiernan (Mather Zickel) had been studying law, someone asked him to say something in legalese. "Tort," he replied. But a torte perfectly describes the wedding's composition: a cake made with eggs, sugar, grated nuts or dry bread crumbs, and coated with a rich frosting. We have all the eggheads in the groom's family, the bride herself is sugar and spice, her family is the nuts, the fathers writing the checks provide the bread, and the whole wedding day is frosted with a rich glow; "It will be just like this in heaven." Maybe so. Maybe so.
Then there is the tort, Rachel's sister Kym, "Shiva the Destroyer, harbinger of doom." In law a tort is a civil wrong requiring damages as opposed to breach of contract which does not. Kym's character is much more complicated than that of a happy bride, so let's see about developing it. We'll start with the setting: an unstated miscegenation. When Kym (Anne Hathaway) sees Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt), she tells her how thin she is, "so tiny, almost Asian." In a movie where race and class might as well not exist, is this a slip of the writer's pen, an unwitting racial profiling? It is taken as a compliment, at any rate, and is the only time race is ever mentioned, not for lack of opportunity. We could give that a pass if it weren't for some other material.
Kym is in recovery. She must interrupt her family visit to attend mandatory meetings of Narc-Anon. She's involved in a twelve step program. Step 1) is to realize you are powerless. Step 2) is to acknowledge a higher power. Then there's the advanced stuff: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.—attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi.
Then back to the gathering. Let's see how they're doing. Kym is distressed because Rachel has her friend Emma slated for maid of honor instead of her sister Kym who she didn't know could make it. But it's conceivable that Rachel can summon the courage to change it. Blood is thicker than water. Of course, that flies in the face of hiring without respect to origin, but this is different. I'd just ignore it were it not for the issue of Kym being forced to wear lilac to be color coordinated with the rest of the bridesmaids. Lilac didn't agree with her, but perhaps she'll have the serenity to accept it. I thought we were for diversity, especially when it came to outward color. But this is different. Still, one could have hoped Saint Francis could have been portrayed as more relevant to modern times, or our modern race concerns more amenable to his sayings. Or maybe I'm just reading too much into it. Let's reserve judgment.
Okay, here's the crux of the matter: the dishwasher. Lots of dirty dishes. Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe), the groom, applies his intellectual prowess to the problem of clearing the load and ascertains that if they were to load the big bowls on top, they'd fit more into it. Paul (Bill Irwin), Rachel's father, listens then says, "You don't know how to load a dishwasher." Sidney replies—in words suitable for the new president Obama,— "The mantle has passed." Ooh!
Maybe he's being a little uppity and maybe not. The ceremonial passing of the mantle has yet to occur. At any rate, the wedding party handles the difference with grace. They will have a timed race to see who can load more dishes in two minutes. Sidney went first and did it his way, then they cleared the dishwasher and it was Paul's turn. They used a watch to time it and were as impartial as an employer hiring the more capable applicant.
Do you know what a "race card" is? It's a metaphor. An employee in competition for a job doesn't produce from a literal deck of cards a "race of diamonds" changing the rules for promotion, but we speak of that in a figurative sense when it happens. He uses it to get on the fast track like a train being switched onto the express line. He's in. Doesn't have to work so hard. Here they are dealing from a literal stack of dishes, when what comes up? Yep, the Ethan plate. Changes the game the same way.
My conclusion is that "Rachel Getting Married" should be understood on two levels. Rachel's wedding portrays the ideal of interracial harmony while Kym's recovery portrays the tribulation our society is going through to get there. This second is woo-woo stuff, as in Rachel studying psychology would learn that there are underlying forces at work. But psychologists can't write prescriptions, and this movie doesn't offer cures for our troubles; it just portrays them. The family's complaint is that while Kym had her drug problems they were the focus of the family's attention, and now her recovery is. When slavery was in force, that was the topic of the day, and now our recovery is. That's how this movie goes.
With that in mind it makes a whole lot more sense. During the round of toasts, Kym goes into her recovery step of making amends offering a prolonged general apology for all the grief she'd caused. The family's response is that her long speech didn't actually accomplish anything tangible to make amends, while Rachel feels that even if she became Mother Teresa, it wouldn't be enough. That's our dilemma with white guilt. Whites adopt a very apologetic stance while Blacks don't feel anything has actually been done, to the point it's felt that if every white person became Mother Teresa herself, it wouldn't be enough.
Then there are the "acute boundary issues" between Kym and her father. She is being driven crazy when he monitors her every move. It's like white employers having to fill quotas and every white person having to use politically correct speech. The boundaries between society's legitimate concerns and guaranteed individual liberties have been crossed.
There's a lot of screaming back and forth when those issues are being hashed out, but it isn't until Kym visits her mother, Paul's first wife Abby (Debra Winger), that we get to the heart of the matter. There they actually come to blows. Why, Kym wanted to know, did she leave her, a sixteen year old, in charge of her little brother Ethan? Abby said that she was good with him (and from the description of Ethan's last day, evidently she was.) Yes, but Kym was a dope addict. But she was good with him. But she was wasted, she weighed ninety pounds. Well, you weren't supposed to kill him. And at that the gloves came off.
Let's just pause here for a moment to see if we can learn anything about ourselves. There's a half verse in the Bible that says, (Eccl. 8:9b) "… there is a time wherein one man ruleth over another to his own hurt." That can be either the slave-owners of the past, or a sixteen year old girl in charge of her brother, things happening resulting in an extreme guilt. The mother felt that Kym was good with him, and the colonists back then felt they were doing the Negro a favor by enslaving him. From C. Eric Lincoln's essay, "Color and Group Identity in the United States," Spring 1967 issue of Daedalus, reprinted in 1969 in a Beacon Paperback, Color and Race, ed. John Hope Franklin (© 1968 by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences), p. 252: "In a self fulfilling prophecy, the white man rationalized the Negro's peculiar fitness, even his God-willed destiny, to be a slave and then enslaved him." The description of Ethan playing in the leaves down by the river leaves one the impression that good was meant and even occurred. Sidney's musical family, besides using apparent African rhythms, also had one sing an old spiritual, having "joy like a fountain," so we may take it that some good occurred and was even meant to. But men rule over others to their own hurt at times, and that also happened. The relatively benign institution of biblical slavery was exceeded by abuse. She wasn't supposed to kill him.
We'll look at one more scene: Rachel and Kym in the hair salon. A Black guy from Kym's recovery group comes up to her and thanks her for her inspiration which gave him courage to get his own life together. He was referring to their therapy exercise of the "human mirror." They were supposed to write down some experience from their past that they overcame, then pass it around for someone to pick and read to himself. It was supposed to be anonymous, but he knew it was hers because of the doodles. He recounted—in front of her sister and the women at the salon—her pedophile uncle who abused her and her sister and their eating problems that brought their weight down to fifty pounds. None of that actually happened, of course, and the family in turn criticized her for lying. "You can't be recovered if you lie." But, she thought, no harm was done.
Let's see how that applies to us. We should be honest about our history. I celebrate Robert E. Lee Day, third Monday of January (my forbears being from Virginia). My Robert E. Lee T-shirt displays this quote: "A Nation That Suppresses Its History Is Doomed To Fail." Let's go back to the essay and look at a bit of our history. (Ibid.) "As American social and moral philosophy evolved through an agonizing assessment of economic preferments and political demands, consensus arose that the issue of color and caste implied in Negro slavery should be excluded from the founding documents of the emerging democracy. … Indeed, the issue of political status transcended the issue of color. All white men were free; all black men were slaves (with the exception of 'free' Negroes who were in a sort of limbo in between)." We've already touched on the injustice and abuse in that system, for which the whites could well feel obliged to make amends, something on the order of a mass tort against the tobacco industry for damages outside of any contract as in fact the Negroes were not included in that contract for liberty. Still, they were treated worse than they should have been, far worse.
Now we have another holiday celebrated the third Monday of January. On it we are likely to hear a recording of a speech titled, "I Have a Dream" where the speaker tells us,
When the architects of our republic wrote the
magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of
Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every
American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men
would be guaranteed the unalienable right of liberty ...
America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her
citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred
obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check
which has come back marked "insufficient funds."
MLK has misstated the situation, making it not a tort, with definite damages that need to be addressed, but a breach of contract which is another animal altogether. (I cover more detail in my review of Eagle Eye.)
Talking to some old men one day, I was told by one of his grandfather whose slaves stayed on after their liberation because they felt they'd always been treated well. If there were no damages, then they had no claim from tort litigation. A breach of contract would have been another matter.
If this movie does in fact portray this sublayer, and if I am reading it right, then it is giving the "Dream" speech due credit. "No harm was done," and indeed MLK prefaced his "bad check" analogy by saying "we have come here today to dramatize an appalling situation." In speeches and therapy one may be allowed to exaggerate for the sake of dramatization. I'll allow that. In the movie the guy who read the note was inspired, and those who heard the speech were inspired too. Again, I'll allow that. But it's become regular holiday fare, the note being read at the hair salon, increasing white guilt, delaying the arrival of mature racial harmony.
There are two neighboring towns where I live, Eugene and Springfield. At one time I was eating dinner in Springfield about three times a week across the street from the Pioneer Museum. After dinner I would head north on Pioneer Parkway, turn left onto Centennial Boulevard—so named to commemorate our pioneers at Oregon's centennial celebration—until I got to Skinner's Butte—named for Eugene Skinner, Eugene's pioneer founder—where I would hang out in the park and contemplate the scenery. I had some sense of history.
One day I spied a sign on a pole. The city council was requesting public input on a proposed renaming of Centennial to Martin Luther King Jr. Bv. I wrote in my objections for historical and other reasons. Some others objected too, for those reasons and others. The council decided not to rename it precipitously, but to table it while they consider other options, other streets. The woman of color on the council—who had been hired out of California to help with race relations—threw a tantrum. "God will judge you!" she shouted. So the council got the few businesses on the street to withdraw their objections and then reversed themselves and renamed it. The woman from California returned mad.
I'd just like to point out that the NAACP in Portland who came down to pick a major street to rename without too many businesses on it, had not thought to consider its historical significance. (And had it been delayed, it would probably have remained named as it was because Oregon's sesquicentennial was approaching in 2009.) If we are worried about a "higher power" judging us, then we should also factor in possible judgment for a disconnection between generations as developed in 2008 — The Day the Earth Stood Still. It takes time to sort through multiple priorities, not like an immature child who wants everything now, or as MLK in his speech put it, "the fierce urgency of now." The woman with her tantrum portrayed that fierce urgency, but "Rachel Getting Married" gives us a clear vision of what mature racial harmony would look like and lights up the steps we need to take to get there without presuming to tell us what to do.
There are a few things that might do us some good to think about. During her heated argument with her sister, Kym said Rachel wasn't being fair to spring a blessed event suddenly into play. OK, but then in Kym's argument with her mother, was Kym being fair to drive off in a reckless rage to introduce her own occasion for sympathy? And the councilwoman who returned to California in disgust, did that help the race relations she was here to promote? If not, then how is she to judge the colonists for not helping the Negro more in the founding documents? If she acknowledges a higher power, how is she letting him be higher if she puts words in his mouth rather than quoting the Bible he graciously gave us? Kym was bogged down in her twelve step recovery, but if we are not honest and if we don't allow for a higher power, we haven't got through the first two steps, to say nothing of the remaining ten, not to mention MLK's "fierce urgency of now." That "now" was wonderfully portrayed by Rachel getting married, but in all honesty, could we expect to get there in a single step?
I think this movie provides needed social commentary whether we are consciously aware of it or not. And if we don't gain anything deeper, it's still a good one to watch. It's set in sometimes rainy Stamford, Connecticut, at social gatherings such as in the big house, with competent acting throughout. Anne Hathaway does a superb job with the emotional ranges of Kym. I was impressed enough by its finer points that I could overcome my visceral discomfort of feeling trapped in a crowd. Some films are moving whether or not one understands all the content, and this one qualifies. I recommend it without apology.
Recommended:
Yes
Movie Mood: Feel-good Movie
Viewing Method: Other
Film Completeness: Looked complete to me.
Worst Part of this Film: Pacing
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Epinions.com ID:
topreviewerman
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Member: Earl Gosnell
Location: Eugene, OR
Reviews written: 80
Trusted by: 2 members
About Me:
BSEE, U. of Cincinnati. Ordained minister, United Congregation of Friends. Poet Laureate, Longfellow, Colorado.
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