Rachel Getting Married

While this seems like a star vehicle for Anne Hathaway, her excellent performance is overwhelmed by the spectacular work of her castmates. Hathaway plays a former teen model and recovering drug addict whose dark secret makes her the focus of her family’s love and hate. On furlough from rehab, she heads home for her sister’s titular wedding, creating a tsunami of feeling and a gentle rain of thought. Her father, played by the inimitable (I have attempted to imitate him and can guarantee that it cannot be done) Bill Irwin, is a bubbling mess of emotions clamped down by a smiling suburban face. Irwin looks like he could melt into a radioactive mass of twitching neurons at any moment, and it’s a testament to his acting that he never gives in to that urge. Also stunningly great is TV on the Radio frontman Tunde Adebimpe as the groom. He presents an inscrutable front, never making it clear whether he’s happy, horrified or just extremely itchy. The rest of the cast is a revelation in that they look like human beings, with wrinkled faces and scraggly hair and the kinds of noses that Hollywood surgeons have tried to make extinct. This is worth seeing for the acting, the inventive camera use and the thoughtful in-scene music, including the best a capella rendition of Neil Young’s “Unknown Legend” since Richard Nixon sang it at his own funeral.