"Rachel Getting Married"

From my review in The American Conservative of the Jonathan Demme movie:

The movie's better half stars a charismatic Anne Hathaway ... as Kym, an attentionaholic part-time model turned full-time drug addict who is furloughed from a posh rehab clinic for her sister's wedding. Exactly as her levelheaded sister Rachel dreads, Kym's self-destructive antics enthrall the multicultural throngs crowding the grounds of their father's Connecticut estate to prepare for Rachel's big day on which the Reform rabbi is to marry her to a tall, gentlemanly black man from Hawaii.

The highlight of the ceremony is the groom singing his bride a Neil Young ballad. White liberals critics have gone nuts over "Rachel" because the interracial marriage reminds them of a certain black Hawaiian's promise that promoting "mutual understanding" is "in my DNA." I fear, though, that even electing Obama President won't get many black guys to understand the appeal of whiny Canadian folk rockers from the Sixties.

First-time screenwriter Jenny Lumet named the groom "Sidney." She is presumably referencing both Sidney Poitier in Stanley Kramer's 1967 interracial marriage movie "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," and her father, Sidney Lumet, director of 1957's "Twelve Angry Men," one of Kramer's successors as a liberal warhorse. ...

Still, a more entertaining screenplay could be written about the star's off-screen misadventures. Hathaway was in the news in June when the FBI hauled away her suave Italian boyfriend, Raffaello Follieri. Outfitted with clerical cassocks and a claim to be the Vatican's chief financial officer, Follieri had wormed his way into a $100 million deal with Bill Clinton and Ron Burkle to sell off Roman Catholic churches in America to pay for sex scandal settlements. On a rented yacht in Montenegro, the bipartisan cute couple also hosted the 70th birthday party of John McCain.

An equally entertaining movie could be made about the real-life Lumet sisters (who are granddaughters of famed jazz vocalist and beauty Lena Horne). When their dad received his Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 2005, screenwriter Jenny, the sensibly dressed old-fashioned leftist, had the global television spotlight stolen from her by the startling new cleavage of her sister Amy, a would-be model and 1992 National Review contributor ("Baby Cons of America, unite: You have nothing to lose but your parents' guilt.")

Now, Jenny / Rachel has taken sibling rivalry to a new level.

Here's some more material I uncovered. Amy Lumet, who was married to writer P.J. O'Rourke back around then, began her 1992 National Review essay:

A VERY polite gentle man in New York asked me this fall if I was planning to vote for Bill Clinton. Talk about insulting! I pointed to my John McCain hat--"I'm a Republican," I said. The gentleman told me that, in his experience, cute young things tended to be liberal. We need to prove him wrong in a major way.

According to Washington Post gossip columnist Lloyd Grove, Amy worked for McCain in the Senate, but I don't have any corroboration of that, although the opening line of her NR essay suggest that. Wikipedia says O'Rourke and Amy Lumet were married 1990-1993. Was Lumet working for McCain during this period?

And here is a picture of the two sisters (with Mrs. Ozzy Osbourne in the middle)

Above is a popular picture of the two sisters sitting side-by-side at the Academy Awards while their Dad, Sidney Lumet, received his lifetime achievement award. Well, actually, the most commonly available screen capture on the Internet is a picture of just one and a half sisters, because Jenny, the screenwriter of "Rachel Getting Married," normally gets cropped in half because the kind of guys who post screen captures on the Internet only have eyes for her sister Amy.

By the way, P.J. O’Rourke, Amy's ex-husband, wrote this Spring in the Weekly Standard about a visit he recently paid to an aircraft carrier:

I was there to get a journalistic hook--a tailhook, as it were--for a preconceived idea. I wanted to say something about Senator John McCain.... Some say John McCain's character was formed in a North Vietnamese prison. I say those people should take a gander at what John chose to do--voluntarily. Being a carrier pilot requires aptitude, intelligence, skill, knowledge, discernment, and courage of a kind rarely found anywhere but in a poem of Homer's or a half gallon of Dewar's. ...

I can speak to John's honor, duty, valor, patriotism, etc., but I'm not sure how well his self-discipline would have fared if he'd been on an aircraft carrier with more than 500 beautiful women sailors the way I was. At least John likes women, which is more than we can say about Hillary's attitude toward, for instance, the women in Bill's life, who at this point may constitute nearly the majority of the "women's vote."

I wish P.J. all the luck in the world in his battle with cancer.

In other, but still somehow related news, Oprah Winfrey is planning to make a biopic about the Lumet sisters' still living grandma, Lena Horne. Alicia "AK-47" Keys is slated to star..

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

"Rachel Getting Married"

Here's my review for The American Conservative of last fall's "Rachel Getting Married," which is still relevant because Anne Hathaway appears to be the frontrunner for the Best Actress Oscar. (This is the version as I wrote it, not as it was printed, so don't blame the magazine for my gratuitous scandal-mongering conclusion in which, based on almost no evidence, I insinuate that John McCain may have broken up P.J. O'Rourke's marriage to the real-life model for Anne Hathaway's character.)

Hollywood likes to squeeze a little more milk out of the DVD cow by occasionally re-releasing an old movie as an (inevitably longer) "Director's Cut." Sadly, we never get to buy a shorter "Editor's Cut." With luck, director Jonathan Demme's "Rachel Getting Married" will be the first. Buried under more than an hour of Demme's Sixties noodling is a nifty sixty-minute family drama.

Demme, who was born in 1944 (in between George Harrison and Keith Moon), was a sort of idiot savant music video genius, who in 1984 made the best ever rock concert movie, Talking Heads' "Stop Making Sense." His 1986 masterpiece "Something Wild" incorporated the nascent "world music" trend delightfully. Unfortunately, the title "Stop Making Sense" proved prophetic. Demme's shambolic 1992 Academy Award acceptance speech for "Silence of the Lambs" may be the most incomprehensible yet.

As Demme's musical-visual gifts dimmed, he turned to "liberal humanist" (i.e., boring) message movies such as "Philadelphia," in which Tom Hanks proves that homophobia caused the AIDS epidemic (rather than, say, industrial-scale gay promiscuity). After Demme's useless remakes of "Charade" in 2002 and "The Manchurian Candidate" in 2004, the industry seems to have concluded that he doesn't have enough brain cells left to handle a big production. Thus, the low budget "Rachel Getting Married" looks like an amateur wedding video. Half the film consists of Demme's not-as-hip-as-they-used-to-be friends improvising tedious toasts and mediocre music.

The movie's better half stars a charismatic Anne Hathaway (a heretofore-bland leading lady whose dark eyebrows made most of the impression in "The Devil Wears Prada") as Kym, an attentionaholic part-time model turned full-time drug addict who is furloughed from a posh rehab clinic for her sister's wedding. Exactly as her levelheaded sister Rachel dreads, Kym's self-destructive antics enthrall the multicultural throngs crowding the grounds of their father's Connecticut estate to prepare for Rachel's big day on which the Reform rabbi is to marry her to a tall, gentlemanly black man from Hawaii.

The highlight of the ceremony is the groom singing his bride a Neil Young ballad. White liberals critics have gone nuts over "Rachel" because the interracial marriage reminds them of a certain black Hawaiian's promise that promoting "mutual understanding" is "in my DNA." I fear, though, that even electing Obama President won't get many black guys to understand the appeal of whiny Canadian folk rockers from the Sixties.

First-time screenwriter Jenny Lumet named the groom "Sidney." She is presumably referencing both Sidney Poitier in Stanley Kramer's "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," and her father, Sidney Lumet, director of 1957's "Twelve Angry Men," one of Kramer's successors as a liberal warhorse.

Various shocking revelations about Kym's culpability in the death a decade before of their little brother ensue, culminating in a confrontation with her mother (1980s legend Debra Winger of "An Officer and a Gentleman" making one of her myriad, but still welcome, comebacks). "Rachel Getting Married" has a decent little plot if you like upscale suburban family tragedies in the tradition of "Ordinary People." Lumet handles the disclosures about the death of the child realistically and effectively. Rather than build up to stagey moments, jagged shards of information are blurted out before you can prepare your emotional defenses.

Still, a more entertaining screenplay could be written about the star's off-screen misadventures. Hathaway was in the news in June when the FBI hauled away her suave Italian boyfriend, Raffaello Follieri. Outfitted with clerical cassocks and a claim to be the Vatican's chief financial officer, Follieri had wormed his way into a $100 million deal with Bill Clinton and Ron Burkle to sell off Roman Catholic churches in America to pay for sex scandal settlements. On a rented yacht in Montenegro, the bipartisan cute couple also hosted the 70th birthday party of John McCain.

An equally entertaining movie could be made about the real-life Lumet sisters (who are granddaughters of famed jazz vocalist and beauty Lena Horne). When their dad received his Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 2005, screenwriter Jenny, the sensibly dressed old-fashioned leftist, had the global television spotlight stolen from her by the startling new cleavage of her sister Amy, a would-be model and 1992 National Review contributor ("Baby Cons of America, unite: You have nothing to lose but your parents' guilt.") Interestingly, Amy Lumet's marriage to hard-partying conservative satirist P.J. O'Rourke broke up about when she is said to have worked for John McCain.

Now, Jenny / Rachel has taken sibling rivalry to a new level.

Rated R for language and brief sexuality.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Names in the News

For my American Conservative review, I'm doing background research on the new Jonathan Demme movie "Rachel Getting Married," which is about sibling rivalry between two sisters, the sensible one who is getting married (to a gentlemanly black man from Hawaii ... hmmhmm ... sounds familiar ...) and the sexy irresponsible one (played by Anne Hathaway) who shows up to steal the spotlight from the bride. So, I start Googling on participants in the movie like the star Anne Hathaway and screenwriter Jenny Lumet to find out who her real life sister is. And ... holy moly, this is the funniest chain of Google connections I've ever seen, total high comedy synchronicity. It's like what Mickey Kaus calls The Undernews all rolled up in one.

If you've got the time, try Googling on various combinations of:

Anne Hathaway

Raffaello Follieri

Bill Clinton

Ron Burkle

Montenegro

John McCain

Jenny Lumet

Sydney Lumet

Lena Horne

Amy Lumet

National Review

I pointed to my John McCain hat

P.J. O'Rourke

Weekly Standard

500 beautiful women sailors

John McCain

There are actually two separate stories here, with McCain being the only common element in them. He does seem to get around.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer