What is a wedding? Unless there's a shotgun, mail order bride or a prearrangement going on, it's usually a celebration of love. Now, imagine a woman who thinks she has fallen so far out of humanity that she states in an AA meeting that she believes she is unworthy of even God's love going through a weekend wedding of her sister. That’s the basic set-up for Rachel Getting Married – a woman who believes she is unlovable surrounded by a constant flow of love. Kym (Anne Hathaway) is a junkie with a very dark and tragic past. Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) is her sister. The former leaves rehab to watch the latter tie the knot in the stunningly good Rachel Getting Married, a return to form for Jonathan Demme, acting tour-de-force for Hathaway, and simply one of the best films of the year.

Honestly, it's hard to recap Rachel Getting Married and expect people to get excited. "That chick from Devil Wears Prada in a movie that sounds a lot like Margot at the Wedding by a director who hasn't mattered like he once did for nearly two decades? And it's about a wedding? Where do I get in line to NOT see that movie?" I can't stress enough how much Rachel Getting Married transcends its set-up. Rachel is about a wedding in the same sense that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is about a dinner party. It's a setting for so much more.

Hathaway brilliantly plays Kym, a woman who has always been the center of attention. She's an addict with mommy, daddy, and sister issues and she's not just the black sheep at her sister's wedding, it's nearly as if she's the only one there with even the slightest character flaw. Demme and writer Jenny Lumet set up a weekend of pure joy at the family home where Rachel is getting married. There's a sweet-and-gentle groom (TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe), musicians galore, cultural dancers - it's like the wedding of Jonathan Demme's dreams. Even Roger Corman, Sister Carol and Robyn Hitchcock stop by to say wish the bride good luck.

How does a woman who can’t feel joy without drugs or drama survive a weekend of constant expressions of love? She lashes out. But Lumet and Demme don't go the soap opera or melodrama route. A lot of modern audiences are going to be bored by major chunks of Rachel Getting Married (just like a real wedding). In one of the early scenes, a rehearsal dinner features roughly a dozen speeches about the bride and groom for probably fifteen minutes or so. It's nearly numbing in its tedious believability. But the purpose is two-fold. One, it feels real, giving the characters a three-dimensionality rarely seen in these movies. So many digital video, handheld flicks go for realistic and end feeling more forced in the process. Two, it makes the impact of the emotional scenes that follow that much stronger. But, like life, Lumet and Demme don't linger on the pain. What Rachel Getting Married so perfectly nails is that life is not a continuous emotional battle, especially not on the occasion of a wedding, and that things come in bursts more than the rollercoaster we usually see in film. Life is fifteen minutes of dancing followed by a moment of reflection on tragedies of the past. Life is a joyous series of speeches followed by an argument that might not have happened without so many drinks lifted in toasting. Life is finally getting the courage to ask your mother something that has damaged you forever and then finding yourself back on the road moments later. Yes, a lot of Rachel Getting Married is repetitive and arguably boring, but that's what gives the emotional scenes their power.

And nothing is boring about the ensemble. Hathaway is note-perfect in every scene and she's nearly matched by DeWitt and a great supporting turn by Debra Winger as the two girl's oddly distant mother. Bill Irwin also shines as the father who clearly gave Kym way too much rope with which to hang herself and Adebimpe brings a grace to his role that a lot of trained actors would have completely missed. But Hathaway is the real revelation here. Clearly, it's a complex role that a lot of young actresses would have jumped at, but Hathaway finds a depth that I didn't know she had without overplaying it. So many of her peers would have played Kym at eleven, all tics and complaints. Hathaway understands that women like Kym aren't overbearing or obnoxious as much as they are self-loathing. No one in Kym's family hates her behavior more than she does herself. It's the best performance of the year so far.

Rachel Getting Married is not a movie for everyone. It's a slowly paced film for sure - ten minutes are spent filling the dishwasher - and you shouldn't go looking for any pat resolutions or melodramatic conclusions. The simplicity of the title is not an accident. That's what the movie is at its very core - not "Kym Getting Better" or "Family Dealing With Pain". Don’t expect either of those things. By keeping their drama real, Demme and Lumet have accomplished one of the rarest things in cinema - making art that feels genuine and, by doing so, delivering one of the few films this year that truly can be called artistic.

Rating: FOUR BONES

Reviewed by Brian Tallerico (MovieRetriever.com Film Critic)

Release Date: October 10th, 2008

Rating: R

Starring: Anne Hathaway, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mather Zickel, Bill Irwin, Anna Deavere Smith, Anisa George, Tunde Adebimpe, and Debra Winger

Director: Jonathan Demme

Writer: Jenny Lumet