There is, almost always, music wafting through the background of Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, a low drawl of string and rhythm that lends tender buoyancy to moments stiff enough to break and propulsive muscle to what requires sonic emphasis. “For the longest time, I’ve had this desire to provide the musical dimension of a movie without traditionally scored music,” Demme said of this choice in a 2009 interview. “We have music playing live throughout the weekend, but always in the next room, out on the porch or in the garden.” It’s a touch both intrinsic to Demme’s instincts as a music documentarian—he of Stop Making Sense and Neil Young: Heart of Gold fame—and vital to the spirit of the film, immediate and unrehearsed. The guitars, sitars, and percussive thrums flow like an operatic circulatory system, a heartbeat for Kym Buchman (Anne Hathaway) in the absence of more obvious signs of life.
Kym, out of rehab on a weekend leave for her sister’s wedding at their childhood home in Connecticut, is in immediate contrast with everything else in her balmy orbit. The soft light in each out-of-focus corner frames her as a black hole in a verdant halo; her jagged haircut and liner-drenched eyes hack like a buzzsaw through suburban New England malaise. But there is sweetness there, too. Love there, absolutely. When her father Paul (Bill Irwin) and step-mother Carol (Anna Deavere Smith) pick her up in the film’s opening moments, there is immediate tenderness. And though she’s acerbic in her reception of Paul—“I thought you were going to abandon me in rehab,” she says—she also melts in his embrace. Already, the dynamics are taking shape: a perhaps in-denial father and the druggie daughter here to rip through the tulle of a dreamy wedding weekend like a fireball monsoon.
This is, in fact, the straight plot of Rachel Getting Married. But that descriptor flattens what is a far more pavonine depiction of this particular dysfunctional family. Demme was rarely one to stretch a script blandly over the basic frames of moviemaking; his legacy lingers for how he transfused texture and freneticism and soul into even his most journeyman work. Rachel Getting Married’s script by Jenny Lumet (daughter of Sidney) is not journeyman in the slightest, but you can see the conventional arcs it might have erected in lesser hands.
Through Demme’s eyes, however, a clean-lined Connecticut estate is merely a container for a conglomeration of cultural intersections. There’s not a whiff of WASP tradition in the wedding planning. Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) has the appearance of a tidy suburbanite, but there’s nothing tidy at all about the spillage of energies in her nuptial orbit. Her soon-to-be husband Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe) is a Black musician and producer. Their friends and family are beautifully bohemian and pastoral. The bride and bridesmaids will wear saris, the groom and groomsmen kurtas. Color is everywhere, denomination irrelevant. At the rehearsal dinner, the groom’s mother declares, “This is how it is in heaven. Just like this.” Heaven, where there are no demarcations like race to sow divide, where everyone is in communion with the love and spirit that flows between bodies and bloodlines.
It’s a lovely visage, but a cynical one, too. Maybe unintentionally, but it’s easy to see the threadbare, Obama-era neoliberalism of it all. No matter how well-intentioned, love alone does not resolve disparity and divide. Love cannot sustainably sugarcoat what exists just beyond the trees that line the Buchman driveway.
This cynicism does not go unacknowledged. When Sidney’s mom speaks of her heavenly fairytale, we see Kym in soft focus in the background, her face doubtful, annoyed. Sure, there is nihilism baked into her disease. But she’s nine months clean, no longer—as she reminds Rachel—in crisis. Her consternation is something any black sheep child can recognize. They see through the seams, through the sell. They recognize how befoolable others are, how they cast an “everything’s fine” sheen over whatever they want, an act of disguise and denial. They’re the sort who live more lightly in the world—who find humdrum survivable, if not outright pleasant.
But Kym is made differently. Her eyes bob about in the early planning sequences: honing in on the anxieties of dress fittings and seating arrangements; noting her father’s neurotic obsession with her wellbeing; recognizing her out-of-placeness not just in garb but in the things she doesn’t know. She is always internalizing the shame that everyone holds their tongues when she walks into a room out of fear of what might happen if they don’t.
She can’t stand the bullshit and so she doesn’t come quietly. She peppers jabs and insults into every conversation. When she stands up to deliver her own speech at the rehearsal dinner, she opens by saying, “I am Shiva the destroyer, your harbinger of doom this evening.”
…
[Footage: December 24, 2011. Home for the holidays. The Christmas tree alight. Wine glass on a kitchen table. Me, shouting something I don’t remember. Pills in my system, Merlot on my teeth. I am loud, then louder. Then: I am asleep in a black room I don’t remember stumbling into. Someone is crying downstairs. My mouth tastes like cement. Outside, a coyote howls.]
I knew Rachel Getting Married before I lived it. I could recognize the language of its characters because I spoke it, too—all dysfunctional families do. Mine was fractured by circumstances beyond our control, a sudden wave of death that struck down several of our own. My mother was one of them, gone quicker than I could comprehend, and it took time to realize what that meant. When we first learn Kym has a dead little brother named Ethan—a plot that reveals itself slowly, painfully, over the film—I thought, Well, of course. This is what the ugliest strain of grief looks like when it hits someone especially allergic.
I was good until I wasn’t and then suddenly I was Kym, a loose-cannon shit-talker with kohl-swiped lids, ratty zip-ups, and black-washed jeans. I was nervous and wrought around the family I couldn’t make sense of. Without an anchor, I was incapable of hiding how painful I found life to be. Everything was stormy ennui. I hated anyone who could just be okay.
My shitty behavior ebbed and flowed and peaked and valleyed just enough that I could get by. I never lost jobs or went to rehab. I was functional and present when required. But it doesn’t matter where and for how long you hide your demons. They’re still there, jutting around in your gut and gristle, waiting for a hose of liquor to bloom them back to form.
…
After her dastardly banquet hall speech, Kym is back home with the Buchmans, where obvious tensions seep through. Rachel is unhappy with Kym’s speech; her gallows addict humor that never lands and the amends she sneaks in at the last minute reinforce her status as the resident attention-sucker.
Demme (and cinematographer Declan Quinn, capturing each gruelingly intimate moment with a handheld camera) follows the family through the darkened house, the colors of nighttime creating operatic pageantry. Rachel, working on a PhD in psychology, pulls out a dictionary to read the definition of amends. “‘Noun, usually followed by for, off-set a disability or frustration by development in another direction.’ But you’ve never said anything to me that’s remotely apologetic,” she says to Kym. Already, her special weekend has a new centerpiece. Since everything has always centered around Kym’s disease, of course it will now center around her recovery.
Kym, attempting to counter, reenters self-pity mode while also lashing out. “All of you people living in this world of judgment and paranoia and mistrust,” she snarls at her family. “I can feel it all the time […] at the slightest sign of ingratitude or absence of atonement. It’s like the fucking Salem Witch Trials around here.”
Her words raise emotions yet again, but in the midst of attempted conflict resolution, Rachel makes a rogue announcement. “I’m pregnant,” she says, her anger at Kym temporarily pausing for all-consuming joy—a feeling too strong to go unspoken, even in the tautness of a fight. Funny how this happens in families. How quickly the tide can change and everyone just goes with it. (Kym, ever the observer, yells, “that’s so unfair!” as everyone celebrates, pissed that as they approached something true and revealing it was snatched away. Back to delusion.)
This family breakdown is in contrast to a sequence earlier in the film, when Kym goes to a 12-step meeting. It’s implied that her attendance is mandatory; it seems as though her sobriety is less voluntary than it is something to do in the absence of something more interesting. The ghostly wedding music that trails her at home is absent here, as if someone pressed a purposeful pause. The only loud sound comes when Rachel knocks over a rack of metal folding chairs, a clanging that announces her lateness to the meeting.
“Cocksucker!” she screams in frustrated anger.
“Only once,” jokes a man in the middle of a share. “My dealer. I was very hard up for cash.”
Everyone giggles—even Kym cracks a smile.
The meeting unfurls the way they usually do in real life. A volunteer reads the steps aloud. People stand up, share their stories, cradle one another in quiet nods and communal murmurs of agreement and support. One man, clearly nervous, shares that this is his first meeting and is greeted by a chorus of gentle welcomes. Another speaks to the new outlook he acquired in recovery, how it’s all “one day at a time.”
“Yesterday is gone and tomorrow is not here,” he tells the room. “The only thing I can do is what I can do today to make tomorrow different. There was a point where I thought I could do one more, take another drink. But it’d always end up the same. You know, one was too many and a thousand was never enough. I got tired of starting from square one.”
As he talks, Kym’s head dips. Sadness settles in her brow. She nods because she is also sick of starting over, though we can see through Demme’s careful camera placements that she’s in conflict with herself. Because what does “one day at a time” look like for someone with no order to those days? No spouse, children, friends, home, or job to fill her hour or lend her purpose. A family who can’t decipher her needs, who easily pretend things are fine. This is the truest version of Kym, among people who know what it’s like to be ostracized from the world under conditions you cannot control.
Hathaway is extraordinary in these moments: her doe eyes held solemnly, features drained of elasticity, a wounded child in each mournful expression. Those eyes relay the film’s truest and hardest fact: it’s impossible to live for yourself when you fucking hate yourself.
At home, Kym’s face reverts to its palest state. There is always a cigarette mounted to her lips. Tricksterism is in her voice. She drags around her lifeless body to the sound of tuning instruments on the lawn. When she meets Sidney, it tells us she’s been away long enough not to know her future brother-in-law. He introduces her to his best man, Kieran, the cocksucker from AA. They lock eyes and smile, Kieran on the balcony and her on the grass, a Shakespearean inversion—stars aligned, not crossed. We then jump-cut to the two of them fucking in the family basement, the only sort of debaucherous fun left for them as sober people.
It’s sweet how the movie provides Kym a gift in the form of Kieran. He is not its focus, nor hers, but he is an accessory of hope. Not just for the romantic possibility, but, as someone farther along in his wellness journey, he’s an aspirational figure. There’s nothing more effective—especially in the resistance phase of early sobriety—than seeing someone like you living functionally.
But it’s also another divide. Because she’s not where he is. She’s not an addict in control. She has not yet reached the vital stage of accountability that allows for real progress. She can’t make true amends. She’s not even the maid of honor in her only sister’s wedding. Kieran is indisputably a part of Rachel and Sidney’s big day while she’s still on the fringe. How much ostracization can one person take before they bend in half forever?
…
[Footage: February 13, 2022. A bathroom mirror. My face is gray. I have a bruise on my stomach the size and shape of a femur. I dump the last of the wine down the sink. It smells like indecency. I’m shaking. My shirt is yellowed by the residue of night sweats. It’s a cloudless day.]
One day, I quit drinking. There’s no more pomp and circumstance to it than that. I just knew I was done—not because I wanted to live but because I couldn’t take dying in such humiliating increments. It was all so embarrassing. That’s the word that still sticks.
The most embarrassing part of addiction is how desperately you cling to approval as you take every measure to ostracize yourself. I made people uncomfortable and kept going anyway. I turned nights out into acts of emotional Russian roulette. I laughed too loud and cried too fast and said stupid things I didn’t mean. Posted stupid shit online. Deleted it. Reposted it. There was physical evidence, too: Hummocky skin lesions that wouldn’t heal. Face sallow, eyes hollow. So diseased I couldn’t imagine, or believe, I deserved being better.
There are so many other awful details I could recount. I won’t, because I’ve done so in all the necessary spaces already: doctors’ offices and group therapy sessions and wood-paneled halls where sobers and wannabes share their stories as a means of self-repair. I believe in the comfort of anonymity for those most private regrets. I dragged myself to those 12-step rooms and within them came to recognize that so much of my anger was actually a choice. I didn’t select its foundation, but still designed my misery prison bar-by-bar, brick-by-brick. I hid in grey chambers because I wanted to hate, not heal. I wanted a reward for my pain.
That’s the selfishness of addiction. It’s part and parcel with what keeps you dependent: the subconscious belief that you’re unique in your victimhood and defined by your bad behaviors. The great gift of sober communities is unlearning these pain points, accepting that we all bruise the same purple even if it heals in different patterns. But it’s not easy getting there.
I fought tooth and nail to crawl back to reality, but even sobriety comes with an asterisk. For me, getting better was a recalibration into something far stranger. I came to realize that no matter your sober status, you are—always and forever—distinctly other from non-addicts. You exist on a frequency the non-afflicted cannot hear or access. It’s lonely as fuck and no medicine or therapy can mend it. All you can do is find painless ways to assimilate when necessary, and coping mechanisms to get through all the rest. And despite your best efforts, there is always the risk of conjuring disorder to break the drowning monotony of wellness.
…
The moment we learn how Ethan died is annihilating in its mundanity: Kym, in another folding chair at another meeting, hands shaking and eyes downcast, tells the room that she was high one day while babysitting. That she took Ethan out for a ride in her car. That they crashed. That he drowned. That she killed him.
“I struggle with God so much, because I can’t forgive myself and I don’t really want to right now,” she confesses. It’s her most honest moment in the film. “I can live with it, but I can’t forgive myself. And sometimes I don’t want to believe in a God that could forgive me. But I do want to be sober. I’m alive and I’m present and there’s nothing controlling me. If I hurt someone, I hurt someone. I can apologize, and they can forgive me, or not. But I can change.”
Demme doesn’t dress the moment up in saccharine flashbacks. It’s just Kym saying the worst thing a person can say about themselves and sitting in the aftermath. The room is pin-drop silent, as silent as the movie ever gets. Kym says thank you. Someone else starts to speak.
Because the confession happens in an AA meeting, and by the virtue of anonymity, it’s real only to the people in that room. Yet it colors in every unspoken word and sideways glance toward Kym from before—the tension at the rehearsal dinner, the rawness between the sisters, and, perhaps most notably, the chasm between Kym and her mother, Abby (Debra Winger).
Abby’s presence is infrequent, but never without a calamitous stillness, as if the camera stiffens in reflex. At the rehearsal, she is gentle towards Rachel but clearly removed. She’s accompanied by a silent new husband. She does not interact with Paul or Carol, though she speaks kindly of them through gritted teeth. She greets Kym without affection, is mannered in her speaking, and flinches when touched. Her gaping lack of empathy or tenderness is not incidental, however. We can see, and so can Kym, that this is how she’s chosen to live her life without her son. By excising all softness.
It doesn’t stop her girls from trying to derive it. We learn that Abby is the first person Rachel and Sidney told about their pregnancy. Later, Rachel goes to her home to pick out jewelry to wear for the wedding. It’s broad and clinically, woodenly modern—a great contrast to the home where they once all lived together, mother and father and sisters and son. Rachel tells her mother she hopes her unborn child is a boy. This linking of ghostly male children is an offering of community that Abby rejects.
Rachel is quietly hurt by her mother’s slow dissolve, while Kym is more confrontational. She watches Abby from the sidelines as if daring her to strike. As the great family seer, she recognizes her mother’s camouflage and knows it’s far worse than anything she’s done. Because Abby is culpable in Ethan’s death, too. She knew Kym was a junkie and chose ignorance—as if acknowledging her daughter’s ailment would reveal her own ineptitudes.
On the eve of the wedding, Kym breaks down. She and Rachel are again at odds. In the living room, Kym laments her role in the family as it currently stands. She tells them they don’t know what it feels like to be fucked up. What it feels like living every day with your inherited sins. Rachel tells Kym she never even knew Ethan because she was high his whole life. It’s the kind of cutting remark only a sister could deliver.
“Who do I have to be now?” Kym asks—not just Rachel, not just their family, but God, too. “I mean, I could be Mother Teresa [and] it wouldn’t make a difference what I did. Did I sacrifice every bit of love in this life because I killed our little brother?”
“Kymmie, it was an accident,” Paul, brokenhearted, tries to say, but Kym’s already out the door, heading straight to Abby’s home. She is sick and tired of shouldering this blame alone. She pulled the trigger but her mother loaded the gun.
Abby is clearly in distress at the arrival of her daughter. Kym’s disheveled appearance means confrontation, and Abby’s been so good about dodging such occasions. But here, in the heat of the moment, the day before her eldest child’s wedding, there’s no escaping. Life is not just something you can run away from as it suits you. Kym is intent to let her know what she’s had to learn more cruelly.
“Why would you leave a drug addict to watch your son?” Kym finally asks. Over and over. It’s a taunt. A plea. Mother, hear me. Answer me. For fuck’s sake, try.
Abby deflects. “You were good with him,” she says through tears. “You were the best you were with him.”
Kym keeps pushing until finally Abby snaps: “I didn’t think you’d kill him! You were not supposed to kill him!” she yells, shaking her. She hits Kym, which Kym takes as permission to fully unspool. No matter how desperately she fights for it, no one else will admit the roles they’ve played in their mutually assured destruction. So she runs to her car and lets it go off-road. She hits a sign and thuds through a bundle of trees. Sometimes, in the absence of your drug, it feels good to willingly crash out.
The cops find Kym passed out in the driver’s seat the next morning. It’s Rachel’s wedding day. She could succumb to the dreadful events of the previous evening, could run off and use, could disappear as she’s done so many times before. But Abby’s outburst didn’t do to Kym what it might’ve in the past. It appears that it exorcised her instead.
She wanders back home, bruised from both accidents. The music is back, ushering this funeral procession. She forces herself upstairs, where Rachel’s preparing for the most important day of her life. When Rachel opens the door and sees the state of her sister, mangled and dirty, eyes open and pleading, she doesn’t flinch. She gets Kym into the bath and washes her gently and quietly, like a parent would a child. There are no apologies exchanged. No emotional revelations. Demme lingers in the potent intimacy, as Rachel notices a tattoo on Kym’s shoulder—a tribute to Ethan. She rubs it, tears fall. They are in mutual cleansing. Rachel makes the choice to stay soft. To be for them both what their mother will not. They are facing their shit.
This is how people change in Demme’s world, because it is how people change in real life: in the silent language that exists between sisters; on a bathroom floor; in the decision to clean a wound instead of judging where it came from. So many great directors find truth in skepticism, but Demme found it in the sparseness of in-betweens. He knew the great promise of rehearsals: for wedding dinners and musical performances and people trying on new ways to heal, in perpetuity until it sticks, because there’s humanity in the effort.
So much of Rachel Getting Married is about these needle-fine moments of grace and clemency. Kym may never be forgiven by her family, but she doesn’t walk away. She comes back even when it hurts. In the bath, Rachel gives Kym something better than forgiveness. She gives her quiet confirmation, through touch and the renewal of water, that her love is not revoked just because it’s been tested.
…
[Footage: May 10, 2025. A laptop screen. I am writing this essay. A fan hums in the corner. I’m drinking a lime seltzer. The sun shines through the blinds of my new apartment. I just moved in. I am not happy. But I am here.]
For years, I confused detachment with maturity. I thought that numbing out, quieting down, and powering off were forms of resilience. But recovery taught me that wasn’t the case. The real secret to getting by and better is in allowing yourself to feel everything, as incessantly as possible. The badgering voices I could once quiet with bottled respite are full volume now.
Some days it’s glorious, all that resplendent music. And some days its putrid repetition is insufferable. Lately, I exist somewhere in the middle of these mutual appreciations. With several boozeless years under my belt, and just as many in near-constant therapy and wellness spaces, I receive everything unfiltered. It’s powerful in its absoluteness, and exhausting in what it implies for my future. I am better, but the world around me still moves like I used to.
Sober and clear of head, I want to give what was gifted to me in AA: radical nonjudgment and lust for change. I applied this thought process recently, through an attempt to love someone romantically. It was, unfortunately, a miscalculation, with a painful outcome I’m still sorting through. But as much as he hurt me, he also taught me something I didn’t expect: that love, or care, or whatever fragile version of it we try to practice, only works if everyone’s choosing it. Through him, I saw all the times I withheld and called it strength, and all the ways that concept had been modeled for me.
Kym sees this same legacy of silence bubbling under her relationship fault lines, but pledges to change all the same. She knows the risk of treating feelings like they’re liabilities. So she shows up at her sister’s door, and she goes to the wedding and she dances and she emotes and she lets herself be loud and take up space because she already lived the alternative and it sucked.
I want that, too. Even in seasons like my current one, when I feel adrift in my own story, I know it’s for the better. I know I’m better. I’m proud of myself for what I show up to. I feel like a broken record when I write about these things, all the hope I keep conjuring for myself. But I’ll keep writing it so I keep feeling it because what else am I supposed to do? Give up?
Sometimes I want to. Once upon a time I could dress my wounds in iron liquid and trudge on, and now I can’t. But when the tools do work, it’s so deeply, meaningfully worth it. My drum beats on because I let it now. What beautiful music it’s starting to make.
…
Rachel’s wedding is a symphony. Music plays on the porch, through the seams, from upstairs, behind trees, in the margins like before but also in loud synchronicity. Practice rounds made for this purpose and performance. The camera drifts from one cluster of joy to the next: people dancing, eating, singing. Kym dances through it all like a tuning fork, absorbing the noise and adjusting her own.
It’s Demme behind the lens telling us—through the magic of musical camaraderie and the static spark of a camera and the poetry of language and dialogue in a script—that broken people can still be part of something beautiful. A messy, semi-repaired addict can take up space in joy without deflating it; can let the past live beside the present without poisoning it. There are no speeches about forgiveness. No lingering shots of reconciliation. A man lifts a child in the air. A bridesmaid adjusts her sari. The groom’s mother holds her hands open to the music. This is heaven, as she said earlier in the film, and Kym’s starting to believe it.