Rachel Getting Married

One daughter gets out of rehab to immediately join her family for the older sister's wedding. If that is not the set up for family drama, I don't know what is. The portrayal of the love and hate felt simultaneously in family relationships is dead on in this film, with both sisters expressing the difficulty of being "the other sister". And while there is some reconciliation, some recognition of the difficulties in the others lives, we don't get a washed over happy ending where everybody is as happy as Cinderella. But we definitely get the impression that everybody truly loves the other.
An additionally important aspect of this film is found in the music. I love when a non-person becomes a character, and in this case the music is an important character. The diversity of musical styles was fabulous and really drove the celebration aspect of the wedding weekend, as well as highlighted the diversity of the people involved. The music seemed to be so diverse that diversity of the people and personalities involved in melding the two families paled in comparison. Adding this character of music to the mix allows the bride's familial relationships to be the focus of the film without getting lost in the significant difficulties of inter-family mergers. And at the same time, this character of music is front and center, and integral part of the film, so that we do not just ignore the other difficulties. We are told that the family merger is important, and the people involved are very different, but that is not the point of this particular story.
4-stars