“Turned up at my sister’s wedding and within minutes had managed to cop off with the best man in the basement” is not the sort of entry you might expect in The Princess Diaries.
No, but Anne Hathaway has come an awfully long way in the eight years since she played Mia Thermopolis, princess of the little-heard of principality of Genovia.
The country she inhabits here is a bleak landscape of familial dysfunction that stems from a terrible tragedy in her teens for which her character Kym bitterly figures she can have no final redemption.
Returning to her well-to-do Connecticut home after months in rehab, the chain-smoking youngster is a mass of defensive barbs and caustic verbal self-loathing. “I am Shiva the destroyer, your harbinger of doom this evening,” she announces on arrival.
She’s back to attend the inter-racial wedding of her sister Rachel (DeWitt), a huge, bustling mongrel of a bash whose side events – wedding breakfasts, dinners, sing-a-longs – will provide a serious test of the twitchy black sheep as she is forced to confront accusing eyes.
Top of the list is her mother (Debra Winger, superb) who recognises something of herself in her neurotic daughter yet seems to be the one person present who cannot forgive. Forgetting is out of the question.
Director Jonathan Demme’s nuanced exploration of a family facing up to its historical demons will be remembered chiefly for Hathaway’s brittle, awards-friendly performance (although she had tackled adult roles before in both Havoc and Brokeback Mountain).
However, away from the self-lacerating Kym there are some fine performances. DeWitt manages to evade being smug and presents Rachel as a loving sibling whose relationship with her sister was soured by circumstance not personality.
Winger brings an icy detachment to the estranged mother while Bill Irwin is affectingly vulnerable as the kind father crippled by a grief that still occasionally bubbles to the surface.
Like any real wedding, it’s fraught with tension and acts as a catalyst to ignite simmering tensions.
This sure ain’t no honeymoon.
Tim Evans
