Rachel Getting Married

An overrated, trumped up bit of late capitalist cultural hysteria posing as deep drama. The self-conscious posturing of this production, drowned in ecumenical good taste and multicultural sanctimoniousness, grates like sugar on a sore tooth. At its heart, it is a ghost story, animated by a central, invisible presence – the specter of the son who was killed – and by the living ghost whom the daughter has become. But this promising, if strained, gothic element, is overcome by the inanity of the wedding and its bourgeois triumphalism. In this sense, at least, the much more modest Last Chance Harvey gets it right: weddings are ceremonies built not on inclusion, but exclusion: on who gets left out or meanly demoted. What Rachel does convey, if one can get past the histrionics, is that the basic unit of family psychology is the secret