Demme best when focused

Jonathan Demme is a director of tolerance.

That’s not just a description of him politically (although it’s hard to imagine another white director so interested in the problems of Haiti, or so at ease directing “Beloved”). It’s really a description of him aesthetically.

Many filmmakers are ruthless about plot and character, always keeping their eye on the mood and their camera on their heroes. Demme, generously, lets things develop as they will (or won’t), and pays everyone the same mind.

Ironically, it’s when he’s resisted that urge that he’s had his biggest hits – the tautly focused “Silence of the Lambs,” the conventionally plotted “Philadelphia.” But it’s his other, looser films that feel like the real Demme.

“Rachel Getting Married,” his newest feature, is a return to the low-budget, low-stress roots of “Citizens Band” and “Melvin and Howard.” In fact, it almost feels like a young filmmaker’s Sundance entry – full of on-the-fly photography, and built around a single, high-impact family reunion.

In this case (as in last year’s similar “Margot at the Wedding”), the event is the marriage of a consistently overshadowed sister, and the problem is the arrival of her spotlight-addicted sibling. This time, though, sis isn’t just attention-grabbing. She’s substance-abusing – and her arrival is just hours after her latest stint in rehab.

The script by Jenny Lumet (daughter of Sidney) starts out like a comedy, with the 12-stepping Kym – beautifully played by Anne Hathaway – happily slinging sarcastic asides. But then the film takes a less conventional turn, first documenting the rituals of its artsy New Englanders and then clearing the stage for some fierce family truth-telling.

The cinema-verité chunks of the film are its least successful, with Demme a-little-too-indulgently sitting back as musicians perform, guests give mawkish toasts and people who shouldn’t be shaking it on the dance floor do. It’s the director at his most generous – and least effective.

Once he goes back to his leads, however, they repay his kindnesses. Bill Irwin, that great clown-turned-actor, invests his doting father with a lot of endearing silliness; Rosemarie DeWitt is lovely as Rachel, the bride who finds her day disappearing in all the storm of Kym’s arrival.

And it is a genuine treat to see Debra Winger again. A quarter of a century after “Terms of Endearment,” she’s old enough to play the formidable mother now, instead of the difficult daughter, and her parent here is a complicated and dangerous character, so utterly closed off and controlled that when her anger comes, it’s an explosion.

But just as Kym takes over Rachel’s weekend, Hathaway owns this film. She has always been a good actress (terrific in “Becoming Jane,”) but she hasn’t always been well served by the movies. (“Brokeback Mountain” burdened her with bad wigs and makeup; “The Devil Wears Prada” worked too hard to make her character likable.)

Here, though, she’s playing a maddening, messy, unreliable, selfish character – and she still makes her interesting and understandable. Not sympathetic, necessarily – that’s a movie-star copout – but believable. And as she leads us to believe in her, bit by bit, we come to accept her as the flawed person she is.

But then, acceptance has always been what Jonathan Demme is really all about.