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Friday, September 11, 2009

BD impressions: Rachel Getting Married

4:21 PM / BD Impressions / 4 Comments

I found watching Rachel Getting Married to be a frustrating experience. On the one hand, I was bowled over by Anne Hathaway's naturalistic performance. True, the character she was playing was hard to like, but she brought her to life and made me forget that I was watching an actor playing a role. On the other, I hated the faux-documentary digital photography, which far from complementing the realism of the performances simply drew attention to the constructed nature of the film... or perhaps I should say "of the video", because that's what this felt like and in fact actually was. I can appreciate what was being aimed for, but in my opinion it just didn't work. Seeing the name of a director of Jonathan Demme's calibre attached to something so amateurish-looking was quite disconcerting: on the one hand, I genuinely admire what he was able to coax out of the characters, but on the other, I wish he'd spent more time on what the thing actually looked like instead of singing off on something with the aesthetic of a home movie. It's worth it for the performances of Hathaway and the supporting cast, but it's hard to reconcile this film with the work of the man who gave us the likes of The Silence of the Lambs.

Image quality: As mentioned above, the movie was shot digitally, using Sony's HDWF900R, which is by no means a cheap piece of equipment. It's too bad, because the results are less than spellbinding. A lot of the time, I was reminded of similarly cheap-looking digitally photographed TV shows like Weeds, with their low contrast, colour fringing and abundance of noise in low-lit shots. Normally I'm somewhat critical of reviews which spend too much time discussing the creative choices made by the director and/or cinematographer in the Image Quality section, but here it's a little hard to separate the transfer from the source. There's little doubt in my mind that Sony have delivered a very faithful presentation of what was originally shot, but what was shot unfortunately looks pretty below par. Facial close-ups show an impressive amount of detail (at least when the camera isn't jittering around so much as to render them as a smear), but it consistently looks flat, unnatural and cheap. Note also that an early sequence in a travelling car has been shot on what appears to be consumer grade equipment (I'm assuming the HDWF900R's size made it difficult to fit inside the vehicle), suffering from severely blown out highlights and combing artefacts. (On the other hand, I'm ignoring the snippets of wedding footage that are supposed to have been shot by one of the diagetic characters on his own consumer equipment.) On the plus side, I get the impression that someone added a thin veneer of artificial grain to the image, which makes it appear slightly less dead, but on the whole it still looks fairly unappealing.

This is an extremely difficult disc to rate, because the flaws, in a sense, are not flaws in the master or the encoding but problems stemming from the director's creative choices. Therefore, in scoring it, I've measured it against the standards set by other digitally-photographed live action movies. At the high end of the spectrum, you've got the likes of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and compared to that, Rachel Getting Married does indeed look underwhelming. At the other end, you've got something like Crank, which has the aesthetic qualities of reconstituted faecal matter. Rachel Getting Married is unquestionably super to it, so in the end I've decided to be cautious and award this disc a middling 7/10.

Rachel Getting Married
studio: Sony Pictures; country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 32.1 GB ; average bit rate (including audio): 40.82 Mbit/sec

4 Comments

 
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