Rachel Getting Married stumbles so much into its moments of grace that, taken as a whole, it cannot be deemed an unqualified success. Still, it’s deliciously watchable—this despite tensions between its earnest script by Jenny Lumet (Sidney’s progeny) and Jonathan Demme and DP Declan Quinn’s shaky, higgledy-piggledy style.

The film gets off to a strained start as ex-junkie Kym (Anne Hathaway) is picked up from rehab—by her father (Bill Irwin) and stepmother (Anna Deavere Smith), no less—and taken directly to her posh family home for the nuptials of her sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt). Lumet proceeds by filling her heroine’s mouth with Diablo Cody–esque witticisms and then having her jokily spotted by a convenience store clerk (“Didn’t I see you on Cops?”). The grind continues until a splendid, sustained dinner scene at an Indian restaurant, in which friends and family (including an oddly dignified Debra Winger as Kym and Rachel’s mother) toast the bride and groom.

Here, the impressive cast finally gets to strut its stuff (the scene seems largely improvised), with Hathaway revealing a deeper understanding of her character as an amplified version of her family’s collective toxicity. Indeed, from this point on, Rachel Getting Married is a brilliant film about selfishness (rather than domestic disaffection), all of its characters demonstrating just how nastily needy they can be. Yet even though this examination culminates in—SPOILER ALERT—Hathaway and Winger coming to fisticuffs (it’s as satisfying as it sounds), Demme drops the ball, concluding with an overlong reception that is deeply evasive: neither catharsis, nor crisis, nor excoriation, nor epiphany.—David Balzer

Rachel Getting Married festival show times:
Sept. 6, 6:30 p.m., Roy Thomson Hall
Sept. 7, 11 a.m., Visa Screening Room