Jonathan Demme has always been good at filming celebrations – think of the high school reunion in Something Wild, the costume party in Philadelphia, or any of his concert films – so it makes sense that he would make a movie centered around a wedding. In keeping with previous Demme-fests, the event here is vibrant, eclectic and conspicuously multicultural, featuring Middle Eastern folk music, Indian apparel, Hawaiian belly dancing, and live performances by Robyn Hitchcock, Sister Carol East and TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe (who, as the groom, essays a strangely affecting a cappella rendition of Neil Young’s “Unknown Legend” in his wedding vows). These aspects of Rachel Getting Married are true to form, even a return to it after the mostly unsuccessful Truth About Charlie and Manchurian Candidate. What’s less expected is that he would interweave the festivities with a bleak drama about a recovering heroin addict and her strained relations with her family. The scenes involving Kym (convincingly incarnated by Anne Hathaway) are intense and harrowing; this is the closest to the bone and least romantic Demme’s been since Melvin and Howard, and while he hasn’t regained the perfect poise he achieved in his 1980s work, I think he’s right to push himself in this uncomfortable direction. The jittery, amateur documentary-style camerawork never lets us get an emotional bearing on the situation, functioning in this way like the headlong title, which puts us right in the middle of an uncompleted action. Whereas a more jaded filmmaker might have ratcheted up the catharsis even more, and another Demme film would have diffused the tension in the general good vibes, Rachel Getting Married maintains an uneasy balance: the wedding provides a counterpoint to the WASPs’ nest of seething anger that is the Buchman family. Kym, stranded on the outside of the happy community and only ambivalently wanting back in, is understood to be a pilgrim-in-progress, someone who has not yet figured her shit out and is beginning to think the world won’t wait for her to do it.