For anyone who loves the hard-to-watch but truly remarkable Rachel Getting Married, the DVD is a must-have, as it includes plenty of deleted scenes as well as those intriguing moments that let you feel even more a part of a film that you love. Rachel Getting Married is a complicated sprawling family drama, which revolves around the weekend wedding of the oldest daughter (Rosemarie DeWitt), as her continually rehabbed sister (Anne Hathaway) comes home and the situation is poised for disaster.

The featuretttes contain those little delicious morsels that everyone hopes for when making the decision to spring for the full-on DVD instead of just renting it again, such as stories about the decision to have fully live music on set, as well as casting decisions, and other tidbits. Overall, the film has a very organic feel, as if you're watching a play being filmed, and getting an inside look at how complicated a (basically invisible) three-camera setup really was to shoot. The music in Rachel Getting Married has the remarkable distinction of occurring concurrently with the action, and when it seems as if musicians are playing in the scene, they really are. This synchronization and improvisation was somewhat difficult to manage, and we're let in a bit to see how it was all accomplished.

As the director, Jonathan Demme appears so liberally in the behind-the-scenes featurettte, one is left to wonder why he failed to make an appearance on any of the audio commentary tracks. As the film is a melding of fictional narrative and documentary filmmaking, it would have been nice to hear Demme's unique insight into his own process and the creation of each scene. The same goes for Anne Hathaway in her wrenching performance as a recovering addict, a role so far from Hathaway's usual up-tempo films that it would have been nice to hear her discuss her transformation from a smile-factory to a dark, threatening and charming recovering drug addict. Rosemarie DeWitt is given her own commentary, and the editor, producer and writer all cluster together into another walking-us-through-the-production, pointing out both mishaps and coincidental moments so perfect they couldn't have been planned.

It's obvious that Demme and his crew likely captured an incredible amount of footage, and though there are a good number of deleted scenes, it would have been nice to see more of it included, especially for the curious who wanted to see more of the fantastical wedding footage. The deleted scenes add to the actual story in some important ways that perhaps Demme felt added unnecessary length. But it's all here, safe and sound on the DVD for us to enjoy.

A wealth of extra material makes the Rachel Getting Married DVD worth every last penny, as we are let into the messy world of dysfunctional family, complicated love, and the bonus complication of a wedding where the two combine and leave us nodding in solidarity and understanding.

Recommend (0)

|  Comments (0)

|  Email

|  Share

Share  Facebook Digg del.icio.us