Jonathan Demme pays homage to Robert Altman with the emotionally charged and darkly comic drama Rachel Getting Married, shown at the Venice Film Festival yesterday. A first-rate ensemble cast features the excellent Rosemarie DeWitt as Rachel; Bill Irwin as her father; a superbly frosty Debra Winger as her mother; and sundry musical figures, including Fab Five Freddy, Robin Hitchcock and Sister Carol East (like Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, music drives this film and it’s one of the ways that the characters express their love for each other).

But, ultimately, the film belongs to Anne Hathaway. She combines a raw-nerved vulnerability and a showy obnoxiousness for the role of Kym, the prodigal daughter who checks out of an institutional rehab facility in order to attend her sister’s wedding, the psychological scars of her former life still very much on show.

Kym’s defensive wise-cracking immediately targets the fault lines in the family. “Are all of her latent food issues rearing their heads?” she inquires about her sister. “You’re so thin, it’s like you’re Asian,” she quips to Rachel, hijacking the dress-fitting to remind her sibling that there’s more than one mess-up in the family.

A mercurial handheld camera flits through the family home, picking up on the subtle ebb and flow of tensions and recriminations, the anxieties that weigh on the family thanks to the presence of the chaotic, damaged, self-described “Shiva the destroyer”. The screenplay, by Jenny Lumet, is smart, spiky and observant. She has a knack of dropping unexpected revelations into scenes that send the film off into new directions. Particularly neat is a sequence that starts with Kym’s clandestine tryst with the best man and fellow 12-stepper Kieran (Mather Zickel) but inadvertently reveals to Kym that she is not, as she had assumed, the maid of honour.

During a giddy, happy sequence involving a dishwasher-loading competition, the joy flicks off like a light switch when the father is confronted with a reminder of the unspoken family tragedy. Later, during a brilliantly uncomfortable argument between the sisters about the way that Kym’s disease, and now her recovery, exerts a gravitational pull on the family, Rachel lets it slip that she’s pregnant. “But that’s not fair” is Kym’s initial reaction.

It’s remarkable that, given how deeply unsympathetic and self-obsessed her character is for much of the film, Hathaway manages to make her so likeable. It’s the kind of wedding – all mawkish self-written vows and inappropriate use of Neil Young – that would drive the most saintly guest to drink and drugs. The urge to self-destruct in a rain of pills and vodka constantly flickers across Hathaway’s face, and the camera captures everything in her huge, bruised eyes and angry storm of hair.

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