DVD Watch - 'Rachel Getting Married' Is an Antidote to Screen Wedding Fluff

By now, most of us are familiar with the Wedding Movie, that glossy, predictable, romantic-comedy subgenre in which women morph into bridezillas, skittish grooms come to terms with commitment and, if Abba is involved, all the guests break into song.

"Rachel Getting Married," out this week on DVD ($28.96) and Blu-ray ($39.95), is so not a Wedding Movie. Sure, it boasts its share of dysfunctional family drama and arguments about who will sit where at the reception. But director Jonathan Demme, with his on-the-fly, documentary-style approach to capturing the nuptials of Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) and Sidney (Tunde Adebimpe of the band TV on the Radio), gives us a more truthful and moving depiction of a wedding weekend than most frothy, buttercream Hollywood fare dares to attempt.

Demme certainly deserved some sort of statuette, or at least (hello, Academy?) an Oscar nomination, for his bold approach to crafting "Rachel," which involved placing cameras all over the sprawling Connecticut house where the film was shot, catching the actors in unscripted moments and, remarkably, recording the score as it was performed live within the walls of that same Victorian home.

"We decided not only to not rehearse, but to truly not know where the shot was," Demme explains during "A Look Behind the Scenes of 'Rachel Getting Married,' " one of two featurettes on the DVD. It's that sense of spontaneity that makes "Rachel" feel refreshingly real, even when that reality leads to truly wrenching scenes involving Rachel's sister Kym (Anne Hathaway, in her Oscar-nominated role), a recovering addict struggling to forgive herself for a life-altering mistake that forever knocked her family off its axis.

The DVD's extras provide more details about that liberating filmmaking process. But to get a full picture of what went on behind the scenes, viewers really need to sit through all the supplemental material, which, in addition to the pair of featurettes, includes nine deleted scenes, a cast and crew Q&A at New York's Jacob Burns Film Center and a pair of commentary tracks. Unfortunately, the bonus content isn't compelling enough to hold most attention spans; many viewers will probably bail long before they finally learn (fun fact!) that the movie was shot in just 33 days.

Another bummer: Several key contributors to the film, including Hathaway, Demme and co-star Debra Winger, appear only briefly on the DVD and opt out entirely from the commentary tracks. Other cast and crew members, including DeWitt and screenwriter Jenny Lumet, gamely try to fill those audio gaps, but the absences are still notable.

The deleted scenes -- which include a devastating series of exchanges in a receiving line, an appearance by legendary filmmaker Roger Corman and additional footage from the movie's sublime rehearsal-dinner scene -- emerge as the extra most deserving of attention. But the truth is, if you choose to watch the movie and skip the features altogether, you'll still wind up with a wedding gift worth cherishing: an emotional, vibrant, unflinchingly honest look at the ripple effects of two people saying "I do."