“Rachel Getting Married: Public Speaking, Train-Wreck Style”
In the excellent Oscars section in last Sunday’s NY Times, film critic Stephen Holden provides some insightful analysis of one of the most memorable moments in this year’s batch of movies: Kym (played by Anne Hathaway) giving a speech at her sister’s wedding rehearsal dinner:
“By turns bizarrely perky, hostile and self-pitying, her rambling four-minute toast at the rehearsal dinner for the wedding of her sister, Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt), offers an indelible, if sometimes repellent portrait of a recovering addict who makes people squirm. Every word and nuance of Jenny Lumet’s dialogue for Kym rings painfully, uncomfortably true.”
Holden charts the serpentine course of Kym’s toast, meandering both in content and emotional subtext from some bad attempts at humor to awkward expose of her time at rehab to even more awkward confession of how she has been apologizing to people she has hurt. I remember thinking as I sat in the theater watching Kym and the pained reactions of the members of the wedding party what an example of overt narcissism: Kym has taken this joyous occasion, the celebration of her sister impending wedding, and made the moment all about herself.
But that’s the point, isn’t it? Or at least one of the prime things screenwriter Jenny Lumet was trying to get across re Kym (specifically) and addiction (generally): When you are in recovery, especially, like Kym, in such a tenuous state, where every moment is an opportunity to slide down the slippery slope — at one point in her toast, Kym says, ““Step will change, step will change. Still waiting for the change part. But as they say, relapse is an inevitable part of recovery, so I get high marks in that mode.” — life is all about them (the addict). I would imagine that there is a totality to experience, where past failures and future hopes crash together in the present, creating a maelstrom with the recovering addict in the center.
Every character has rights. And in the case of Kym, she has the right, whether intentional or not, to shift the spotlight to herself, her struggles, her past ‘sins,’ including an enormous one which hovers like a pall over everything she does. As Holden puts it:
“HER gaze wide-eyed with panic, her attitude cheerfully sardonic, Anne Hathaway, playing Kym Buchman, the central character in “Rachel Getting Married,” gives a brave performance that doesn’t ask to be liked; only to be believed.”
The rehearsal dinner toast is a great scene. And we’ve already dissected another notable scene in the movie — the dishwasher sequence. There are numerous other memorable moment in Rachel Getting Married. If you haven’t seen the movie, be sure to do so.