Sunday, October 5, 2008

EIFF: Rachel Getting Married

I think this was an American movie trying to be a Swedish movie. Again, a solid festival favourite: damaged girl returns home for a sibling’s wedding and becomes the catalyst for all the damage of the family at large to come dripping out. This one, however, chose poignant, emotionally charged scenes interspersed with overly long and pointless scenes that made me wonder if the actors themselves even forgot (if they ever knew) how the scene related to anything. The most blatant of which included a five minute dishwasher loading scene – within which the dishwasher is loaded, unloaded, and loaded again immediately – that was capped off by the completely uninspired, tactless choice of dropping the elephant into the room in the most common and unskilled way possible. (Really ruined the movie for me that such a heavy handed rookie first-draft device would survive subsequent drafts and find itself in the final cut edit of the movie) There was such a limitless possibility to this story, and the emotional journey of the main character in particular, to explore how a person or family can survive this tragedy intact, but all this movie did was introduce us to the drama, then walk away from it barely examined.

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