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Seven Pounds doomed by labored premise.

Seven Pounds opens with a trembling, tearful Will Smith calling 911 to report a suicide — his own. The rest of the film pulls back to show how his character — an apparent U.S. Treasury agent named Ben Thomas — got to that point.

The film’s high-concept screenplay, courtesy of television veteran Grant Nieporte, is the worst kind of artificial, labored, only-in-the-movies scenario, the most preposterous bits hard to pick apart without giving away the mystery at the core of the film. It is not dependent on a gimmicky twist ending as much as on a gee-wiz, would-be inspirational but ultimately downbeat premise that is revealed gradually. The whole story — rooted in a tragic auto accident in Ben’s past and some rather odd present-day behavior toward a motley crew of beleaguered strangers — only comes into focus, ostensibly, in the film’s final passages, though I suspect attentive viewers will have most of it figured out by the midway point.

The film is so driven by its cascading revelations that there’s no chance of truly rising above what’s on the page, but director Gabriele Muccino and star Smith do a better job of shaping this into a watchable movie than you might expect.

Smith and Muccino previously worked together on 2006’s The Pursuit of Happyness, which, like Seven Pounds, was a kind of male weepie in which Smith played a damaged man plagued by some serious family problems. I liked The Pursuit of Happyness more than most critics — much more, really — because I thought its portrait of poverty was more detailed, more harrowing, and more spot-on than any Hollywood film in memory. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a mainstream film that made the viewer so palpably aware of the value of a dollar to someone who doesn’t have many.

Seven Pounds doesn’t give Muccino and Smith nearly as much real-world material with which to work. The star/director duo give the film a gravity it would not earn in lesser hands, but the lingering pleasures are surely much more incidental than intended in a film driven by such a Big Idea.

The casting is haphazard. Woody Harrelson is awkward as Ezra, a blind salesman Ben berates over the phone, while Barry Pepper never does come into focus as a childhood friend helping Ben with his mysterious plan. Michael Ealy is terrific casting as Ben’s younger brother, but his role is too small. What the film does get right, and what almost makes the movie work in spite of itself, is casting Rosario Dawson as the principal object of Ben’s initially unexplained interest.

Smith and Dawson grow into a film couple that not only looks amazing together but have such charm that you yearn for movie-world wish-fulfillment to triumph over the film’s grim fidelity to its premise and let them have a cheaper, sunnier ending. Their connection is touching despite the heavy-lifting script manipulations that go into it. But it isn’t quite enough to save Seven Pounds.

Seven Pounds

Opening Friday, December 19th

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Third World Fairy Tale

Slumdog Millionaire opens on the precipice of a climax: Gangly 18-year-old “tea boy” Jamal (Dev Patel) sits in the crosshairs of the Indian version of the television game show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?. He is one question away from the game’s ultimate prize of 20 million rupees, and the game’s producers break to let anticipation build overnight — and to investigate how an uneducated kid could have gotten so far.

“What the hell can a slum dog possibly know?” a Mumbai police interrogator asks in between actions the Bush administration would no doubt label “harsh interrogation techniques.”

How Jamal, a street urchin turned low-level laborer, could have advanced so far is the mystery of the movie, and four possible explanations are offered: “lucky,” “cheated,” “genius,” “it is written.”

Back in the police office after the rough stuff has done no good, Slumdog Millionaire moves into a pleasing double-helix structure, intertwining dual flashback sequences — Jamal’s hardscrabble life story and his unlikely question-by-question negotiation of the game — around his police interrogation, linking the two by showing just how Jamal came to know all the answers. (For instance, when Jamal knows the name of an Indian cinema action star, we see how, as a child, Jamal fought through excrement to get his autograph.)

There’s plenty of memorable material here, as cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle follows kids through Mumbai’s garbage-strewn slums, pulling up from street level to show the vastness of the jagged jumble of corrugated tin-roof shacks. This beginning to Jamal’s childhood story hints at a Dickensian aspect that takes full flower when Jamal and his brother — alone on the streets after their mother is killed in an anti-Muslim raid — are scooped up by a local Fagin and taken to an orphanage of sorts that turns out to be the headquarters of a begging operation. Here, some children are blinded with hot liquid, because “blind singers earn double.”

Though this makes for a memorable journey — bits like Jamal and his brother scamming Western tourists at the Taj Mahal — Slumdog always feels artificial. British director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting) doesn’t have a feel for this kind of crowded, destitute, modern setting, which some other contemporary filmmakers — Mira Nair in Salaam Bombay! and Monsoon Wedding, Fernando Meirelles in City of God — have brought to similar material.

Or maybe that’s not what he wants. Slumdog Millionaire is essentially a Third World pop fairy tale. It reminds me a little of Kung Fu Hustle, another movie everyone loved but me. It’s got a crackerjack title and an interesting premise, but the final product is not quite as lively or original as it sounds. The plotting becomes increasingly conventional as the two narrative strands move toward a dual climax, and the end result is so formulaic that it’s hard to work up a suitable emotional investment.

Slumdog Millionaire

Opening Friday, December 19th

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Vaughn and Witherspoon in listless holiday comedy.

Vince Vaughn is an odd figure. As a guy-movie comedy icon, he’s not quite like his sometime co-star Will Ferrell, a force of nature who dominates whatever scenario he’s in (for good or ill). Instead, there’s a sense that Vaughn is a particularly coarse and oblivious guy who inhabits a real world — and that world doesn’t comfortably include women except as a passing diversion.

Vaughn has appeared in something like 40 movies and, as near as I can tell, has had a convincing relationship with a woman in exactly two of them: His pairing with Jennifer Anniston in The Break-Up worked because that film had the guts to make the relationship itself fail. The only actress to have tamed the beast is wild-eyed Isla Fisher in Wedding Crashers, who needed Vaughn’s womanizing cad the way the ax needs the turkey.

This characteristic of Vaughn’s filmography makes his pairing with Reese Witherspoon in the new holiday comedy Four Christmases seem like lazy casting, as if someone realized that these two bankable stars had never been in a movie together and decided to join them. For her sake, Witherspoon has convincingly coupled with a range of actors in her films (Josh Lucas, Mark Ruffalo, Joaquin Phoenix), but there’s always the high-strung whiff of Tracy Flick about her.

With a workable screwball premise — Vaughn and Witherspoon are a couple forced to make Christmas trips to the homes of each of their four divorced parents — that the likes of Barbara Stanwyck and Cary Grant would have devoured, there are the bones of a good movie here. And if Vaughn and Witherspoon had been asked to play ferociously to type — his sloppiness and disregard running head-on into her fussiness and precision — perhaps something would have come out of it. But, instead, Vaughn and Witherspoon are meant to be a well-adjusted, simpatico couple. And no one is having that, especially the actors, who seem to loathe each other on the screen even when their characters don’t.

This awkward dynamic could have been taken advantage of, but there’s no mean streak here, no joy in play. Four Christmases is just another listless studio product to fill slots on the holiday-movie docket.

Four Christmases

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Hot and Bothered

She: high school junior just relocated to Forks, Washington, to live with her nonverbal, sheriff dad. She’s pretty and quiet and accident-prone and trying to make some new friends. And then she sees him walk into the cafeteria.

He: high school junior who lives with his mysterious, monochromatic-clothed family in the countryside. He’s got bleach-white skin and purple lips and gold-looking eyes below smirk-shaped eyebrows, and he looks tortured by how sensitive he is. And then he sees her.

Unless you’ve been living in a world without Entertainment Weekly or teenage girls, then you know that she is Bella and he is Edward, and they are the hottest couple to happen to romantic fiction since Heathcliff and Catherine. Or something like that.

They star in Stephenie Meyer’s book series, of which Twilight is the first. And now it’s a movie. And how is it you don’t know about this?

Well, in case you don’t, here it is: Bella (Kristen Stewart) is a girl, and she loves and is loved by Edward (Robert Pattinson). But there’s a cactus in their relationship corner. You see, Edward’s a vampire.

That’s about all you need to know, except that I’ve hardly ever seen as much excitement from a movie audience as I did for Twilight. At a recent preview screening filled with teenage girls, every beloved line and character and moment from the book was greeted with cheering and huzzahs. When Edward says, “I don’t have the strength to stay away from you anymore,” the theater was swoon city. There were more girlish squeals than the opening night of a Star Wars prequel. It was contagious. I may have plotzed a little about Edward, as well. What can I say? I’m a sucker for Claire de Lune too.

The Twilight series is what has been filling teen consciousness since Harry Potter exited stage right. I’ve read all the Potters and have only seen but not read Twilight, so take this with a grain of salt: Meyer’s story isn’t a seventh as clever as J.K. Rowling’s. Twilight lacks all the little details and crackerjack fabulosities that make Rowling’s tale behave like the fantastical real world it’s supposed to be. Also gone is any sense of wonderment the audience might be given over the lead character’s induction into a hidden “world behind the world.” Instead, it’s all just taken in stride, fairly ho-hum.

What Twilight has is super hot, sexy reciprocal obsession between a man and a woman. Or a girl and a 100-year-old vampire. Whatever. Love has rarely been so urgent, so angsty, so perilous, so breathsucking as that between Bella and Edward, which is how it feels when you’re in the moment, so score one for Twilight.

And there’s also a super hot, sexy chaste obsession. Oh, sure, they kiss. Twice. But Bella and Edward don’t get past first base.

Twilight is directed by Catherine Hardwicke, who made the teens-in-peril Thirteen and the teens-in-purity The Nativity Story. In Twilight, Hardwicke splits the difference. Bella’s life is literally in danger the closer she gets to Edward. He may not be able to stop himself once he gets going. And so they hover near each other for two hours, breathing each other’s air and keeping their hands to themselves.

Therein lies my one true gripe with Twilight. The plot keeps the couple in an annoying push-pull limbo; Edward keeps coming up to Bella and telling her to leave him alone. Hardwicke reinforces it as the characters are constantly moving toward and away from each other, even in casual conversation, and the camera moves toward one at the expense of the other. Hardwicke’s direction is like a game of one-upsmanship. Toss in the many tight close-ups, and it makes you want to shake some sense into these kids.

It’s also got a Google-search/dream-sequence montage, for heaven’s sake, and a totally silly baseball action scene, but none of it really matters. Twilight is totally critic-proof.

Twilight

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Clint Eastwood’s latest Oscar bid disappoints.

Clint Eastwood ought to be a more memorable and significant filmmaker than he is. Throughout his prolific career — he’s made at least seven films per decade since the 1970s — he’s told plenty of interesting stories about crime, dishonor, and corruption, history, combat, and heroism. He’s a solid if unspectacular craftsman who seldom releases movies without merit. But with the exception of four Westerns (most recently 1992’s Unforgiven), two unusual biopics (1988’s White Hunter, Black Heart and 1989’s Bird), and 1993’s heartbreaking A Perfect World, Eastwood’s films are curiously detached and curmudgeonly, with few memorable emotional or stylistic high points. When this strained seriousness is overindulged, it results in negligible work like Changeling, Eastwood’s fictionalized retelling of an actual 1920s Los Angeles missing-child case.

An emaciated and frightened Angelina Jolie stars as Christine Collins, a telephone-company supervisor whose young son is abducted one day while she’s at work. Five months later, the LAPD discovers her son and returns him to her, but she immediately suspects that he’s not her child — for one thing, this new boy is three inches shorter. The LAPD, though, is unwilling either to accommodate Collins or renege on its own story, so she begins a tentative struggle with the cops that eventually wins her an extended stay in a Los Angeles psychopathic ward — where, it turns out, she’s not the only woman who’s fought the law unsuccessfully. While she attempts to free herself, an ominous new case with terrible implications further undermines the police department’s credibility.

With Changeling, Eastwood is toiling in the shadow of numerous Southern California crime pictures, so he manufactures a mannered, opaque neo-noir world of light and dark that smudges the allusions to superior works like Chinatown and L.A. Confidential. Unfortunately, his lighting scheme doesn’t enhance character or illuminate any larger social anxieties. His actors struggle to define themselves against this creeping blackness as best they can, but the sparse natural lighting and the bisecting shadow schemes swallow up everyone from concerned minister Gustav Briegleb (a restrained John Malkovich) to concerned detective Lester Ybarra (Michael Kelly).

Yet there’s a hint of what such cool-eyed professionalism can accomplish in two consecutive scenes occurring halfway through the film. In the first scene, Collins tries to avoid the Catch-22 of life in the psych ward: If she’s hysterical and outraged by her wrongful incarceration, she’s clearly mentally unstable, but if she’s calm and collected, she’s emotionally withdrawn. During her informal evaluation scene with the menacing head doctor, each reaction shot inches closer and closer until the scene climaxes with a huge close-up of Collins’ shaken, tear-stained face.

The second scene is another two-actor affair between Detective Ybarra and a young kid about to be deported. The scene between Ibarra and the kid is a ghoulish inversion of the scene between Collins and the doctor, as the kid tries to convince the detective that his gruesome testimony is true. How these two simple, sharp, chilling scenes wormed their way into a film as diffuse and unsatisfying as this one, though, is anyone’s guess.

Changeling

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Time After Time

Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-Wai may be familiar to most Memphians as the director of this year’s locally filmed My Blueberry Nights, which was his English-language debut. But he made his name, at least in the West, with a series of sleek, frenetic, über-modern, über-urban ’90s films — Chungking Express, Fallen Angels, Happy Together. Even when he’s gone period, as on the early Days of Being Wild or his career-best In the Mood for Love, it’s still been in urban settings.

For that reason, Ashes of Time is the outlier in Wong’s filmography. Made in 1994 — Wong took a break on post-production for the epic to make Chungking Express on the quick — it’s a wuxia film, the historical strain of martial-arts films. It is set in ancient China, amid a stark landscape of peasants and warriors. In setting, it couldn’t be more different from Wong’s other work.

And yet, thematically, it fits into Wong’s oeuvre perfectly. Few filmmakers have so consistent a tone and set of concerns as Wong, whose films almost always hinge on memory, loss, and romantic longing. With Ashes of Time, he imposed these themes on the wuxia genre, and the themes won.

Though considered a seminal work of modern international cinema, Ashes of Time never had an official American release, until now. With Ashes of Time Redux, Wong has re-edited and refurbished the film, cutting it down to 93 minutes (from the original 100-minute run time), adding digital tinting to enhance the color, and adding a new score from Yo-Yo Ma.

Shot by Wong’s longtime collaborator Christopher Doyle, Ashes of Time Redux is — like all Wong films — visually rich. Shot in the Chinese desert, Doyle mixes breathtaking, almost surreal landscape shots with extreme close-ups on the film’s all-star (in Chinese cinema terms) cast. Set in a “time of eclipse,” Ashes feels less like a historical piece than a missive from a past dystopia or an alternate world.

But Ashes of Time Redux is as difficult to follow as it is beautiful to look at. The film is structured around five seasons and passages from a Chinese almanac. At the center of the plot, such as it is, is Leslie Cheung as the agent Ouyang Feng, who hires famous bounty-hunters for people in need. In and out of Ouyang’s house drift assassins-for-hire and those who need them, many of them haunted by romantic regrets. All the while, Ouyang fixates on the woman (Maggie Cheung) who married his brother.

It is a highly elliptical, heavily mannered film. The action scenes are few and almost abstract, with more emphasis on natural beauty and human brooding. Wong tames the Chinese action cinema, for better or worse, into a film that fits his own character — one that luxuriates in melancholy. It is gorgeous, frustrating filmmaking.

Ashes of Time Redux

Opening Friday, November 7th

Ridgeway Four

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Conventional crooked-cop fare.

Before the closing credits to Pride and Glory start, there’s a tag explaining how the movie is not based on a true story. The conceit is that the film experience is so stunningly authentic that the audience needs to be decompressed back into the real world with a reminder that it was only a movie.

It’s a little annoying, because a lot of what happens in Pride and Glory is so unbelievable. On one level, the film’s a typical scuzzy, New York corrupt-cop movie. Four cops are killed, and it’s clear to everyone but the characters in the movie that these were rogue policemen. Ray Tierney (Edward Norton) is called in to join the investigation. Ray has a troubled past but is bright and in need of some redemption — he’s damaged but he’s got the goods.

Ray’s brother, Francis Jr. (Noah Emmerich), was the boss of the four dead cops, and Ray’s dad, Francis Sr. (Jon Voight), is police brass with a vested interest in seeing the case cleared. The prime suspect, Tezo (Ramon Rodriguez), is a killer on the run. And maybe nobody wants him more than Jimmy Egan (Colin Farrell), brother-in-law to the Tierney boys and captain of the NYPD football team.

It becomes obvious very soon who’s on which side of the law; it gets more interesting when that line moves. What’s goofy is how absolutely lawless — but dumb at it — the bad cops are. They would’ve gotten caught right away if this were based on a true story. The story shifts off the axis of credibility, climaxing with the nadir of plausibility.

Director Gavin O’Connor (Miracle, Tumbleweeds) sets a frenetic pace, but he resists the urge to go Tony Scott on the movie. Pride and Glory‘s bravura is punctuated by tender moments that make the movie: Francis Jr.’s Christmas morning with his cancer-stricken wife (Jennifer Ehle, who steals the movie in about three scenes); Ray gently interrogating a child.

This is a high-profile role for Emmerich, the character actor who has been so good in Little Children and Beautiful Girls (among others). It’s a showcase for his talents. Worse for the wear is Farrell. He’s like a black hole: The eye slips right over him, and the scenery chews him up, even when he’s overacting.

Norton is good, again, but he’s aging onscreen in weird ways. He’ll no doubt be an excellent middle- and late-age actor, but until his boyish looks catch up to his years, he’s going to have to keep working overtime to make his maturing characters convincing.

What’s best about Pride and Glory are the familial underpinnings to the story. The extended Tierney family seems more real than anything on the mean streets. Would that they existed in a plot more worthy of their drama.

Pride and Glory

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Among School Children

The Disney Channel’s High School Musical series has never been as generic or as bland as its name implies. Sure, all three installments of this wildly successful franchise are set in an ultra-hygienic, sun-kissed learning funplex where classes last five minutes, pep fests draw thousands of enthusiastic students, the drama kids get the best seats in the cafeteria, and everyone is pretty, reasonably well-adjusted, and likely to burst into song at any moment. But let’s face it: No matter what you thought of your own high school experience, High School Musical‘s idyllic fantasyland is a much more pleasant place than the grubby, cynical, supposedly authentic teenage world of Superbad or Sex Drive.

Besides, attention should be paid to any series clever enough to name a character after the evil Puritan magistrate in Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible (the uninspired reading and discussion of which is a widespread high school ritual all its own) and structure its catchiest musical number around the dangers of defying an artificial social order. But I was more than a little stunned by the conceptual and artistic merits of High School Musical 3: Senior Year, which — impossibly, gloriously — contains some of the year’s most exciting and emotionally resonant sequences.

HSM 3 begins in chaos. Troy Bolton (Zac Efron), point guard of the softest, most well-choreographed basketball team in New Mexico history, is in trouble: His East High team is getting destroyed by West High in the championship game. Meanwhile, the other pressures of senior year loom for Troy and his pals on and off the court: graduation, college, separation from the womb of public education, and, of course, the successful production of cell-phone-obsessed drama teacher Mrs. Darbus’ spring musical.

Mrs. Darbus (Alyson Reed) ameliorates this teenage uncertainty through art therapy: She instructs her gifted teen composer (Olesya Rulin, a butch Radar O’Reilly) and choreographer (Lucas Grabeel, impeccably sweatered and not-so-secretly trapped in the closet) to write and stage a meta-play about the student body’s hopes, dreams, and fears. As a result, the numerous musical numbers drift between fantasy and reality, evoking a state of dream-like delirium.

The film’s handling of teenage love and lust is absurdly chaste but nonetheless refreshing. Only super-pimps would feed their lady chocolate-covered strawberries, but only High School Musical‘s stars would finish this meal with discreet kisses on the cheek. Instead of focusing on the free-floating sexual hunger endemic to more “adult” teenage fare, though, the film explores deeper and pricklier questions about adolescent identity.

This emphasis on the twin pressures of parental expectations and individual soul-searching adds necessary weight to the thin storyline. And these internal conflicts are clarified by the much-improved cinematography. I hated the over-bright TV-movie look of the previous films; every shadowless face and body seemed lit by several maximum-security prison-yard spotlights. The visuals in HSM 3 are more nuanced while embracing a vibrant color palate of pinks, reds, lavenders, and whites.

The two revelatory numbers involve the two marquee stars, Troy and his stalwart sweetheart Gabriella (Vanessa Anne Hudgens). Hudgens’ musical number limns the emotional sorrow of a peripatetic teen; she sings her goodbyes to her man and her community as the pictures on the walls vanish behind her. Efron’s solo epiphany occurs as he survives a hailstorm of basketballs in the gym and stalks the halls in search of his true self. These two scenes, as well as the bittersweet, schizophrenic showstopper, are riveting tweener psychodrama precisely because they are so unexpected. For a few minutes, anyway, these wooden idols become real boys and girls.

High School Musical 3: Senior Year

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OMG/HaHaHa

After winning the Hometowner Award for best local feature at last week’s Indie Memphis Film Festival — along with a slew of other jury citations — Morgan Jon Fox and John Tom Roemer’s OMG/HaHaHa gets a week-long run at Studio on the Square.

Fox is no stranger to Memphis filmmaking, having previously won the top local prize at Indie Memphis for his debut, Blue Citrus Hearts, but OMG/HaHaHa marks a serious step forward for the filmmaker, something hinted at by the “special recognition” citation the film garnered from this year’s Indie Memphis narrative-feature jury.

Visually and tonally, OMG/HaHaHa is inspired by films such as Harmony Korine’s Gummo and Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. The Gummo connection comes through strongly. If you can’t stomach Korine’s film, you might struggle here. If you think Gummo is beautiful, as I do, the best parts of OMG/HaHaHa are likely to be quite moving.

Where Blue Citrus Hearts was relatively conventional in following two teen protagonists through a coming-out drama, OMG/HaHaHa dispenses with standard narrative. It’s a series of often acutely observed moments from the often messy lives of a group of interlocking characters.

The arc of the film is more emotional than narrative, though the film is given a web-culture framing device to pull its various strands together. The tender, compassionate tone is familiar from Fox’s other work. Visually, the most memorable moment might be the afternoon coupling of a couple of post-high-school guys who fell in love in geometry class and are taking their relationship into adulthood.

Screenings of OMG/HaHaHa will be preceded by a trailer for Craig Brewer’s upcoming web series $5 Cover, for which Fox served as assistant director.

Opens Friday, October 24th, at

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Pleasure and Pain

“Where is the musicians that got the taste?/Where is the supply that’s going to last three days … I understand the culture’s of a different kind/But here world ‘celebration’ just doesn’t come to mind.”

— Gogol Bordello, “American Wedding”

Eugene Hutz, singer and songwriter for the New York-based “gypsy punk” band Gogol Bordello, may scoff at American weddings, but he would probably be quite pleased with the Connecticut-set affair that dominates Rachel Getting Married.

This quasi-low-budget, quasi-indie film from director Jonathan Demme stars Anne Hathaway as Kym, a drug addict who leaves a long rehab stint to return to her family home for the wedding of her older sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt). It has been positioned, in Hollywood shorthand, as the “Anne Hathaway Junkie Movie” — the familiar attempt by a pretty young actress to go dark and gritty in pursuit of award-season hardware.

Happily, Rachel Getting Married is so much more than that. Rather than Hathaway’s troubled Kym dominating the movie, she becomes merely a key part of it, as various family dramas play out against the backdrop of an enormous, engaging wedding celebration. In this way, Rachel Getting Married evokes Mira Nair’s intoxicating Monsoon Wedding, where weighty family melodrama was eventually overcome by pure, joyous spectacle.

Once you get past the casual, unexplained opulence of the setting (which comes across like a Bon Appetit spread gone bohemian), the wedding weekend celebration in Rachel Getting Married emerges as something of an Obama-era liberal utopia — a vibrant, musical, interracial, multicultural ideal.

Rachel’s fiancé, Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe of the Brooklyn rock band TV on the Radio), is a striking presence — a big, barrel-chested, gentle giant with Ray Charles specs and Dizzy Gillespie jowls. He’s a musician, and as Sidney and Rachel’s family and friends come together, a spirit of cultural and musical ecumenicalism overtakes the film: A pre-wedding celebration featuring a rock band, comic, soul singer, jazz sax player, and Eastern religious chant presaging an all-night reception that mixes Afropop, reggae, hip-hop, punk, and gypsy music.

Director Demme is a major name not known for having a definitive personal style. His filmography,mixes glossy prestige projects (The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, The Manchurian Candidate) with intimate documentaries and performance pieces (Swimming to Cambodia, Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains). His most memorable directing may have come in a couple of terrific concert films, Stop Making Sense (with the Talking Heads) and the underrated Neil Young: Heart of Gold. In those films, Demme’s camera was hypnotic in capturing live performance. There’s some of that here, both in the wedding celebration and the raw, John Cassavetes-like family interactions.

Demme uses a handheld camera to dart around intimate moments, capturing furtive reaction shots. He stages Kym’s tumultuous homecoming as an oscillating series of intense interactions and quiet retreats. The documentary-like feel of the film is enhanced by the lack of a traditional score. Instead, unnamed wedding musicians, forever practicing on the lawn or on the porch, provide a score that emanates entirely from within the on-screen world.

As Kym, Hathaway — in a chopped bob and dark eyeliner — is superb, conveying the character’s despair without unduly dominating the film. And Demme and screenwriter Jenny Lumet parcel out the family backstory, with the extent of Kym’s past behavior and the mark it’s left on the family gradually revealed. But, to its credit, Rachel Getting Married is as committed to embracing joy as it is to conveying a family’s barely effable pain. And it makes this clear with a simple, lingering, magical final shot.

Rachel Getting Married

Opening Friday, October 24th

Studio on the Square