Rachel Getting Married--Some Thoughts

Rachel Getting Married: Some Thoughts

1. Twice Kym knocks on Rachel's door and is admitted--the first time with the shrieks of joy and recognition, the second time with a heartfelt "come here." As the saying goes, home is where when you go there they have to take you in. Kym’s real home in the movie is Rachel’s room. The first time she knocks, Kym is returning after eight months in rehab. The sisters are thrilled to see each other, and they mark the moment by recounting to friend Emma, in a joyous, overlapping counterpoint, a story they both love. The second time she knocks, Kym is returning from her devastating confrontation with their mother and the subsequent car accident. Though Rachel is getting ready for her wedding, and though she has been full of resentment at the attention-grabbing ways of her younger sister, the sight of Kym's face -- split lip, black eye, and bruises -- melts her. In the next scene Rachel tenderly bathes and soothes Kym.

2. The mother, Abby, as if written by John Cheever, has a warm and winning smile, which she uses to conceal her inner coldness. She has loved her children in her way, but her smile has always promised more than it can deliver. Her daughters have had to deal with the chilling disappointment that always lurked behind the warmth of the smile. And yet, both are attached in their own way to their mother. Kym, for her part, asks for her repeatedly during her first hours back with the family.

3. The father, Paul, wants always to make it okay. He is a man of powerful passions, and he has a good heart. He is often seen embracing his daughters, his wife, and in one memorable moment, his first wife, Abby. That latter embrace, a moment after Rachel, their eldest, has just been married, seems to sum up their entire relationship. We see them passionately hugging, even clinging to each other, his hands in her hair -- a long hug. Then they separate. Their eyes meet, and they try with their faces to express what they are feeling, but they can't. So they give each other a helpless social smile and a shrug. With their bodies they can express their profound emotion, but they cannot communicate anything to each other with their faces or their smiles. The moment seems expressive of their entire relationship -- a primal physical bond unmoderated by a language of words or facial expressions.

4. A rhythm of buildup and disappointment—hinted at in Abby’s smile—is powerfully expressed in two important scenes in the kitchen. In the first, Rachel is angry that Kym has used the rehearsal dinner for a self-indulgent monologue that brought the entire party to a temporary embarrassed halt. Rachel is venting, Kym is being defensively angry, and they're going back and forth, until Rachel pauses, and chooses that moment to announce that she is pregnant. The ensuing joyous uproar silences Kym, who is bitterly disappointed at this turn their fight has taken. Her disappointment is comic—we laugh when she cries out, “That is so unfair!”—but from a longer perspective, we can see a profound family dynamic being acted out. The second scene showing buildup and disappointment is the impromptu dishwasher-loading competition between Paul and Sidney. The two competitors and the entire group are carried away by an increasingly wild enthusiasm as the two men in Rachel's life engage in their mock battle. The older man, Paul, is on the verge of victory when a plate with the dead son's name on it is inadvertently produced, sending Paul away in silence and suddenly ending the game.

5. Paul from his first moments -- "Who wants hot dogs and hungabungas?" -- is seen feeding people--not only with food but also with his eager, loving facial expressions, his excuses, and his passionate embraces. In the family he has tried to provide what Abby could not. He believes in feeding. Kym's addictive habits -- alcohol, painkillers, cigarettes, sex – may all be seen against the background of her father’s strategy to fill the emptiness that Abby leaves in her wake. Rachel's bulimia may likewise be seen as a response to her father’s feeding, or overfeeding.

6. Kym's descent into addiction is set up by these two parents, a mother who promises warmth but delivers coldness, and a father who wants to feed people into health. The daughters clearly have different relationships to their mother. Rachel has been able to identify with her mother, as we see in the scene in which they discuss Rachel’s pregnancy and impending marriage. Kym from the beginning of the movie still craves her mother's love, is still seeking for the promise of that apparent warmth to be fulfilled. She rushes to embrace her mother at the rehearsal dinner, but Abby only wants her to put out her cigarette.

7. The tensions created by these parents for these daughters explode in three fearsome car rides. The first, in terms of historical chronology, is a wild ride that Rachel is described by Emma to have taken while being taught to drive. The description is comical and admiring because the point is that Rachel is highly competent and successful even when she seems out of control. But Rachel’s wild ride involves sideswiping a taxi, knocking off its side mirror, and nearly plowing into an elderly patient who was being loaded onto an emergency vehicle. When we think about this ride, it is clear that Rachel was lucky not to have killed herself or others. The second car ride is the tragic one in which Kym, taking her three-year-old brother home from playing in the park, drives off the road and into the lake, killing him. In her account of this event, Kym says that she was 16, which is possibly also the age Rachel was when she was being taught to drive. The younger daughter has also driven dangerously, perhaps following her older sibling, but she has been less lucky. The final ride, of course, is the one in the movie we are watching, Kym's hysterical drive away from her mother's house, ending in an accident that could have been far worse than it was. In one sense, Kym's second ride, this one, more closely approximates her sister’s ride, even down to the slight damage to the car, the presence of an EMT vehicle, as well as a possible encounter with death that she luckily survives.

8. The death of the boy haunts the movie as it haunts the family. We understand that death with tragic clarity after witnessing the confrontation between Abby and Kym. The boy Ethan, some 12 or 13 years younger than his next older sibling, may have been a mistake child and may have aroused all sorts of alarming feelings in the mother, Abby. What we see, though, is Abby's response to the altogether reasonable question of Kym's, "Why did you leave me with him? You knew I was out of my mind." Abby responds first with well-worn rationalizations -- "You were so good with him." When Kym challenges these—and it seems that she is doing this for the first time—Abby responds with fury and lashes out, first with words ("I didn't think you were going to kill him.") and then, when Kym still demands an answer, with a blow to her daughter’s face. One beat later, Kym answers with a blow to her mother's face. It is a horrifying moment.

9. The heart of this movie is expressed in the tender scene in which Rachel bathes and soothes Kym the following morning, enabling her to participate in the wedding that is soon to begin. It is, however, unclear from all the evidence presented whether Kym tells Rachel that she has struck and been struck by their mother. Both interpretations—both that she tells and that she does not tell--are supported by what we see on the screen. Interestingly, the original shooting script had Kym tell Rachel about it immediately, but the film leaves it ambiguous. Later, when Rachel asks to embrace her sister and her mother at the end of the celebration, it is not clear whether she knows what passed between them the night before. As I view the scene, it seems more likely that Kym has not told Rachel. The trusting, open, loving expression on Rachel's face, in that moment, argues that she does not know the horrific facts. But perhaps she does, and the deep joy she has felt from her wedding and the ensuing celebration has given her an inner strength with which to seek to reconcile her warring sister and mother.

10. Rachel Getting Married concludes with a wedding and a celebration. As such, it partakes of the tradition of comedy, in which all the complications and problems are resolved in the concluding wedding. The film is clearly not a comedy. Neither, though, is it a tragedy. It combines the two genres beautifully. The terrible confrontation between Abby and Kym is folded into and partially subsumed by the joy of Rachel's wedding. The story of that confrontation, pointing to the family's tragic currents, recedes into the background, supplanted by the wonderful wedding itself. Kym, an angry foreground figure through much of the first half of the movie, now becomes but another supporting background figure in her sister's wedding. If the movie had been a true comedy, the conflict between Abby and Kym would have been resolved in the wedding. But their tragic encounter is very much unresolved, as we so painfully witness in their uncomfortable embrace as engineered by Rachel.

11. In this movie, Rachel Buchman marries Sydney Williams, a successful black record producer. The Buchman family is thus joined with the Williams family, and the signs are all for a rewarding union. Actually, the Buchman family has welcomed African-American people into it since long before. An otherwise unidentified black man speaking at the rehearsal dinner, clearly an intimate of the family, who has known the daughters since they were girls, tells of his wonder at the upcoming wedding, giving the movie its title, and evokes the dead boy, “my man, Ethan.” Paul for his second wife has married a woman of color, Carol. Now Rachel has continued this family tradition by marrying a black man. The marriage, building on this family tradition, suggests a reconciliation for American culture generally. The tragedy of this American family, embodied in Abby's smile, her rationalizations, and the murderous fury with which she defends them, was played out in the tumult of the 60s and 70s. Now, the movie seems to suggest, these tragic currents—resulting in years of self-destruction by Kim and the death of the boy—may find some reconciliation in the multiracial harmony expressed by the entire wedding party and the extended celebration we are part of. The terrible lack of satisfaction and psychological health at the heart of this family, that drove an entire generation into rebellion, may be resolved in the winsome, calm presence of Sydney and his family. As Sydney’s mother says at the same rehearsal dinner that Kym uses to flaunt her illness, "This is paradise." From this perspective, promising reconciliation, the movie can indeed be seen as a comedy. But the tragic currents remain. The family dynamics are still on view, dealing frustration. Kym at the end of the celebration is still impelled towards her mother, now to seek her forgiveness for striking her, but she is stopped at the door by the well-meaning Paul, who now wants to feed her a job, thus unwittingly preventing her from reconciling with her mother.

12. Rachel Getting Married is an accomplished work of art in showing both the tragic, destructive currents of a family alongside the reparative, loving ones, and in showing the two currents as inextricably linked. The relationship between Rachel and Kym carries the weight of this dual vision. They deeply cherish and deeply resent each other. By the time each has expressed her resentment and we have been with this family during an eventful weekend, we see that each sister is struggling to emerge from the shadow of the other—Kym from the shadow of Rachel’s primacy in the family and her better relationship with their mother, Rachel from the shadow of Kym’s lifetime of florid and attention-getting self-abuse. Their loving embrace at the end of the movie, with the wedding and celebration over and Kym on her way back to rehab, gives the film a measure of hopefulness that love at least for now has the upper hand over hate. But the film also gives us ample reason to suspect that Kym will have more florid relapses in the face of her sister’s continued successes—soon as a Ph.D. and a mother. Or maybe not. Perhaps Kym is now on the road to greater maturity. The movie can be read both ways. It shows us a family that is broken and tragic but blindly groping toward a measure of emotional health. Just like most.