Like falling in love again

Director Jonathan Demme's first fictional feature in nearly five years, "Rachel Getting Married" captures the anxieties of family dynamics and the difficulties of emotional closure. The film is shot in a loose, documentary-like way, and the rangy, exploratory visual style and therapy-infused dialogue caused it to be among the most talked-about films coming out of the Toronto International Film Festival, where it had its North American premiere earlier this month.

Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) might be the one getting married, but it is her sister Kym (Anne Hathaway) who makes herself the center of everyone's attention.

Fresh out of rehab, Kym is a hard-charging, big-mouthed mess who doesn't know how to live a life free of drama. A tragedy in the family has broken them all apart, and the divorced parents (played by Debra Winger and Bill Irwin) have never figured out how to put things back together.

Add a healthy number of wedding guests at the family's leafy Connecticut home, and the stage is set.

With "Rachel Getting Married," Demme, 64, has returned to the playful, deeply humanist storytelling of such early work as 1980's "Melvin and Howard" and 1986's "Something Wild," both of which are widely acknowledged as having influenced a younger generation of filmmakers. The change is telling, coming after Demme's years as an in-demand Hollywood director, a period that was sparked by his Academy Award-winning thriller "The Silence of the Lambs" and included such earnest, issue-oriented films as "Philadelphia" and "Beloved."

After 2002's "The Truth About Charlie," an update of the classic Audrey Hepburn-Cary Grant pairing "Charade," and 2004's remake of "The Manchurian Candidate," Demme said he was left feeling at loose ends.

"I wanted to just get out of the complexity of big moviemaking, having enjoyed it a lot and having stressed a lot," he said during an interview just before "Rachel Getting Married" premiered in Toronto. "I stopped reading scripts and I decided I was really on a vacation. And then I started to get the itch to film something about a year after that."

Demme turned to documentaries, crafting "Neil Young: Heart of Gold" and "Jimmy Carter Man From Plains." He also has been working on a documentary about New Orleans and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

"The further I got away from fiction films, the more I felt really comfortable being away from fiction films," he continued. "I still loved seeing them but [had] zero interest in making them."