Lost and Found Family-Oriented Film Reviews: Graduation and Rachel Getting Married

I wrote these now-revived reviews for Amazon and 

The Stranger. 

The review of Rachel Getting Married dropped off Amazon after awhile, though several versions of the DVD remain for sale; this tends to happen with consistently re-released home videos. Graduation, on the other hand, remains on The Stranger site, but the last third got cut off for some odd reason.

GRADUATION 

(Cristian Mungiu, Romania, 2016, 128 minutes) 

It's tragic that some kids don't get enough love. It's even more tragic that some don't get any at all, but Romanian master Cristian Mungiu's Graduation takes on a father whose love turns toxic when put to the test.

The shift from benevolent protector to poisonous antagonist occurs after an unknown assailant attacks Eliza (Maria Dragus from Michael Haneke's anti-fascist fable The White Ribbon). Granted, Romeo (Adrian Titieni, who recalls Belgian everydad Olivier Gourmet) is less of a model citizen than he appears. He's a control freak and an adulterer, but Eliza is one scholarship away from attending Cambridge, and she has to ace her exams, so the respected physician calls in favors and encourages her to play along.

It goes against everything for which he and his perma-fatigued librarian wife, Magda (Lia Bugnar), raised their only child: to reject the corruption that characterizes Romania, a country Mungiu portrays as a post-communist wasteland of Brutalist buildings and parched greenery.

Just as Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne directed Gourmet as the ultimate bad-good dad in 1993's The Promise with Jérémie Renier as his son, DP Tudor Vladimir Panduru frequently depicts Romeo from the back such that his body speaks for him in a way his voice can't, reinforcing the constraints of his environment (fittingly, the Dardennes served as co-producers). 

Graduation isn't as harrowing as Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days or Beyond the Hills, but it's just as unsettling in a more restrained register.   

RACHEL GETTING MARRIED

(Jonathan Demme, USA, 2008, 108 minutes) 

Pitched somewhere between Robert Altman's A Wedding and Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding--but more cautiously optimistic than either--Rachel Getting Married marks a change in course for Jonathan Demme. Granted, few Oscar-winning directors have walked a more diverse path. 

After a series of documentaries and remakes, The Silence of the Lambs filmmaker tries his hand at the intimate chamber drama, and with the help of actress Anne Hathaway (The Devil Wears Prada) and actress-turned-screenwriter Jenny Lumet, daughter of director Sidney, he pulls it off.

The festivities kick into high gear once Kym (Hathaway, with smeared eyeliner and unkempt, blunt-cut hair) takes a break from rehab for her sister's big day. It soon transpires that Kym, who hides her wounded soul behind a veil of sarcasm, serves as the Buchman's resident black sheep. The problem goes deeper than drugs to a tragedy in which she played a part.  

As Kym, Rachel (Mad Men's Rosemary DeWitt), their parents (Bill Irwin and Debra Winger), groom Sidney (TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe), and the rest of the bohemian Connecticut brood struggle with the past, the nuptials continue, graced by performances from past Demme collaborators, like Sister Carol East (Something Wild) and Robyn Hitchcock (Storefront Hitchcock). The hours between the reception and after-party toggle between humor, affection, and painful revelation. 

In the film's production notes, Demme claims that he and cinematographer Declan Quinn (In America) attempted to make a film that looked like "The most beautiful home movie ever made." By using handheld cameras and focusing on believably flawed characters, they've done just that.

Images from the IMDb (Adrian Titieni and Maria Dragus in Graduation and Anne Hathaway, Rosemary DeWitt, Tunde Adebimpe, and Mather Zickel in Rachel Getting Married) and RogerEbert.com (Hathaway and DeWitt).