(CBS) Hollywood is extending a wedding invitation in the form of a brand new movie. By all means RSVP, says our critic David Edelstein:

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Something's inherently terrifying about family-occasion movies - the ones where everyone converges on home-sweet-home for a wedding or anniversary or funeral.

Defenses come down, grievances gush up; the past is in the ultra-present tense. No wonder everyone gets blotto.

The strangest coming-home film I've seen in years is "Rachel Getting Married." It's also the most powerful. I'm still puzzling out its mix of utter desolation and overflowing warmth.

The movie stars an amazingly vivid Anne Hathaway as Kym, the bratty ex-child model who returns to her family's Connecticut house for her sister's wedding after nine months in drug rehab.

It's shot like a documentary, the camera among the characters, so jitters are built into the style, and all the busy strangers add another layer of alienation because Kym is used to being the center of attention.

Rosemarie DeWitt's Rachel is fed up with being upstaged, especially at her own wedding.
A family member who should be here isn't (the absence has something to do with Kym) and the whole movie shivers with a sense of loss.

Pretty grim, huh? Except the director of "Rachel Getting Married" is Jonathan Demme, who hit the big time with his least characteristic film, "The Silence of the Lambs."

Success wasn't all good; Demme has had a hard time recovering his freewheeling old voice, although his documentaries have been exhilarating, especially concert films like "Neil Young: Heart of Gold."

Demme brings something distinctive to "Rachel Getting Married." Working from a script by Jenny Lumet, daughter of director Sidney Lumet and granddaughter of Lena Horne, he adds musicians and dancers &#-151; multicultural exuberance. The marriage is interracial; there's a feeling throughout of social boundaries dissolving.

People have said the movie's long musical sequence after the wedding is self-indulgent; I say Demme is being indulgent, but the self? Nothing to do with it. I think he's suggesting that even though the family drama at the center is ugly and horrible, there's a larger family, and the possibility always of connecting with something larger than oneself.

Can a movie be this miserable and, somehow, this affirming? Only if, like "Rachel Getting Married," it's a masterpiece.

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