"Rachel Getting Married"

"Rachel Getting Married" opens on a very tight shot of three people sitting on what appears to be a park bench. Nearest us is a tense, watchful brunette sucking anxiously on a cigarette; furthest from us, a surly young man with a messy mop of hair. In between them is a calm, professional-looking woman of whom the young man demands, "I want my Zippo! Give my fucking Zippo!"

To which the woman quietly replies, "Do you understand that you're making a choice?," and only as that line as spoken do we notice that the woman is wearing the white jacket of a medical professional. The smoker needles him about burning down a building, he lashes back by asking if she's going to run him down with her car.

And at that very moment, a car pulls up and a middle-aged man gets out. The smoker heads towards the car - looking nervous and relieved all at once- and the man greets her, then introduces himself to the professional woman with the exaggerated politeness of a born people-pleaser.

It's an unremarkable opening for a film, and at the same time, a miraculous one. With very little fuss, no establishing shots, and no exposition, the filmmakers give us a wealth of information and set the tone for everything that will follow. We know that the brunette, Kym (Anne Hathaway) is leaving rehab on a pass to visit her family, and we can see in her eyes that's she's going to be a handful. And Irwin, in about two lines of dialogue, perfectly captures the make-nice propensity of the dad in denial.

From that promising beginning unfurls a loosey-goosey dysfunctional family drama whose characters mostly don't trouble themselves to be lovable, but emerge that way nonetheless. Director Jonathan Demme, doing his best work in years, uses techniques (hand-held cameras, a soundtrack largely provided by musician characters rehearsing for a wedding) to create a cinema verite vibe that is intimate and raw. We're not allowed a comfortable distance from which to view the family's dysfunctions - we live them.

The "Rachel" of the title is Kym's sister, and her wedding is the occasion for Kim's brief release from her rehab hospital - one of many where the character has spent time over the years. Hathaway is a revelation here. Her Kym is a haunted soul whose emotional pain is palpable even (and especially) when she can't stop putting herself at the center of everyone's attention on a day that ostensibly belongs to her sister. She gives a rambling, embarrassingly self-revelatory toast at the rehearsal dinner, and we acutely feel her loneliness as her attempted jokes fall flat, while other toasters receive warm applause and appreciation for their inarticulate stammerings.

Kym is guilty of causing a terrible family tragedy, and the scene in which we learn about this (set at a 12-step meeting) is handled and acted with breathtaking delicacy. I respect screenwriter Jenny Lumet's decision to get this cat of the bag early on, rather than save it for a big, eleventh-hour revelation; it's yet another example of how truthful and uncontrived this film feels.

As Rachel, the "good" sister, Rosemarie DeWitt has the more thankless, less "showy" role, but she doesn't back off from the character's sometimes flinty self-righteousness.

The most puzzling thing about "Rachel Getting Married" - and I haven't quite decided if it constitutes a flaw or a stroke of genius - is its dichotomy between restraint and excess. For all the emotional trauma that's on display here, this is a spectacularly disciplined film. There are no moments of histrionic excess from any actor. Debra Winger, in particular, as Kym and Rachel's estranged mother, is frighteningly icy, but communicates that coldness by doing no more than tightening a smile or looking past Kym with a superficially cheerful but glazed expression.

If the uncomfortable stuff is reigned in, the happy parts know no boundaries. (Yes,there are happy scenes - this is a wedding movie, after all.) Watching the rehearsal dinner toasts that went on forever, the endless dancing scenes at the reception, I got the idea that Demme had so much fun at the parties he created that he just didn't want them to end, even in the editing room. I, however, felt more like an exhausted wedding guest trying to drag her date off the dance floor and into the car. I think a good 10 minutes or more could have been trimmed from the proceedings with no discernible ill effects. But that's a minor quibble.