Rachel Getting Married is theatre. There are a lot of superficial ways in which this makes sense - the limited set, the focus on character and dialog, and the subject of a dysfunctional family with a secret that slowly emerges through the night, reminiscent of plays as various as Long Day's Journey Into Night and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - but the identity with stage rather than film goes deeper, I think, than that. It has to do with the way stage and film communicate fiction to us. There are certain things that you can and can't do in either, and this shapes the stories and how they are told. We hear all the time about directors or novelists who have a story to tell and who tell it, truthfully and directly, in the medium of their choice, but I think we don't as often stop to consider how different the story would be if the novelist were a playright, or the playwright a director. I am talking not only about changes in dialog and narrative voice and so on, but also fundamental matters of tone and character, and even plot.
I have often heard that stage actors must learn to be subtler in their facial gestures when they transition to film, and that film actors must learn to go big. This is self-evident. I wonder, though, if the necessities of acting in either medium have influenced the way their stories are written. A playwright simply can't depend on every member of an audience catching a sideways glance in the eyes, a slight downturn in the mouth, to advance a crucial point; the strokes must be drawn large. Subtlety and layer must be conveyed not physically, but with words, since half the audience is always behind the speaker and you can't always depend on the actor to deliver exactly what you want. Here is a pretty general rule: films are driven by faces, plays by words. The result is two totally different types of fiction.
I have to admit that there are some pretty great faces in Rachel Getting Married, but it is nevertheless written like a play. I have been trying to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes me sure of this, and I think it has to do with us. We are a character in Rachel. We walk through the house and listen to the speeches. We dance in the night and leave in the morning. This is not normally how film works, which is to render us invisible and non-existent. The filmic eye is kind of like the eye of God; we never question that it can show us whatever the director wants us to see, including a character's dreams. It can go everywhere, and disturbs no one.
Plays, on the other hand, are a spectator sport. The whole idea of a soliloquy (which would be totally inimical to film) is of a character speaking solely for the benefit of the audience, even if he or she is not aware of it. But even this is not always the case: Iago frighteningly addresses the audience in Othello, and Salieri conjures us out of thin air, because he needs an audience for his recollections, in Peter Schaffer's Amadeus. Note that when Amadeus was made into a movie, a new character was added: the priest, who replaces the audience as the recipient of Salieri's thoughts. It would have been inconceivable for Salieri in the movie to address the audience in the movie theatre, or to speak to no one. That is not how the language of film works.
But back to Rachel: no one addresses the screen in this movie, but we are nevertheless there. I am not sure exactly how I know this. There is something confessional in the way the camera is held, a dangerous sort of veering in and out, too close to their faces and then back again. There is also a lack of what we might call a directorial voice. What sets theatre apart from any other narrative art is that you are free to look where you choose. Movies always tell us where to look, and even though we may notice important details in the background, it is always in spite of a focus somewhere else. There is always a guiding lens that we can either work with or against. Novels are perhaps the most controlling of media - we can't look in the background (or hardly) even if we wanted. But plays, even if they have ways to direct our attention, essentially have no control over our focus. We can watch the speaker or the listener, or the actor standing closest to us. Of course we can't change what happens, or who speaks, and so this may seem like a small freedom, but it is actually a tremendous one. All observation is achieved through perspective; we don't ask "why is this green?" but rather "why did Shelley or Ibsen or Scorsese make this green?". Perspective is what connects a work of art to the artist. To give the audience control of their own perspective is, therefore, to fundamentally change the way art is received.
My sense in watching Rachel is always of a stage larger than what we are shown. Take the crowd scenes, when the extended family is gathered around some table and the camera follows those who speak. I am always aware that I can see only a small part, in the same way that I choose who or what to look at on stage. I know I am missing things with every choice. The camera in Rachel also has an uncanny ability to track exactly who you most want to see, so that the motion of the camera around the table, from person to person, feels like a wandering gaze.
Here is a test. Step 1: Watch Rachel Getting Married. Step 2: After you watch the rehearsal dinner with all the toasts, notice how you felt through every stage of the process. You probably felt very uncomfortable at some point, and probably noticed that most people around the table were as uncomfortable as you were. We can be scared, nauseated, shocked by movies, but it is not often that we are made to feel uncomfortable in this way, as if we were there and this was our sister or sister-in-law. This is the discomfort of someone who is there and who wishes he were somewhere else.
