So I saw Rachel Getting Married over the weekend, and I’m happy to report that the trailer was right. You should believe the hype.

Plenty of critics have addressed the remarkable turns by Anne Hathaway (as recovering addict Kym), Rosemarie DeWitt (as Rachel, the sister who is getting married), and Debra Winger (as the girls’ estranged mother.)

I’d also add Bill Irwin’s to the list of remarkable performances, since his desperate kindness as the girls’ dad–his raw need to make his family happy, so he can be happy himself–lacerated me. I wanted to hug the man and kick his butt at the same time.

New York’s David Edelstein does a great job explaining why the movie–written by Jenny Lumet and directed Jonathan Demme–is so piercing. To paraphrase him, the film begins with the cliches of dysfunctional family drama (dark secrets, people who withhold love, etc.), bur it floods them with the contradictory emotions that make actual dysfunction so complicated.

When she stands up to deliver a toast at Rachel’s rehearsal dinner, for instance, it’s obvious Kym is only going to talk about herself. And she does. But there’s something about the writing and the camera work and Hathaway’s peformance that shows us Kym is trying to talk about her sister. She just doesn’t know how to do it.

And God… that kicked me in the stomach.  The movie doesn’t pretend that Kym (or anyone else) can be easily reduced. And it doesn’t pretend that families feel the same way about each other all the time.

That attitude results in a perpetually shifting  tone that I want to talk about. If you’ve seen the movie (or you don’t mind mild spoilers), then join me after the jump…

To state my last point in a different way: A movie like Rachel Getting Married makes me realize how tidy most screenwriting is–how most films limit themselves to one or two emotional realities. In this movie, there’s a new reality every second. People can be laughing like crazy, then someone says something–usually a stranger who doesn’t know the family history–and everything changes. Like that. And a few seconds later, it changes again. The uncomfortable cloud floats away and the laughter starts again.

And that. Is so. Real. Are you my cousin Lisa? If so, do you know what I’m talking about? Like at Thanksgiving last year? There were, like, fourteen mini-dramas in three hours. But in between that, people were having fun.

My favorite scene in Rachel Getting Married enacts this dynamic well: It’s the rehearsal dinner where Kym makes the aforementioned toast. And the great thing is, even though she’s the main character, Kym’s toast is buried among everyone else’s. It’s not first or last, which is usually the way this goes. You know, to tell us how important a character’s suffering is, filmmakers put her breakdowns in prominent places.

But here, Kym’s dysfunction, for a moment at least, doesn’t dominate the family. It’s just part of it. Before and after her, we get odes to genuine love, we get people referencing old events that still cause tension (but that never get explained), we get soft moments of affection.

And we get a lot of everything, because the scene is luxuriously long. Seriously, almost a dozen people talk, and Demme doesn’t hyperactively edit their toasts to make them go by quickly. Instead, he lingers on each speech (and the reactions it causes around the rest of the table) until viewers can feel they understand what this clan is about.

That emotional information resonates throughout the rest of the movie. Take Rachel’s new mother-in-law: Because of her heartfelt, God-centered toast, we know enough to guess what she’s thinking in a later scene when Kym makes an ass of herself. Rachel’s mother-in-law doesn’t say anything in that later scene, but by remembering the details of her earlier appearance, we can guess the meaning of her expression.

And how thrilling is that? The movie is vivid enough to invite emotional responses, and it’s subtle enough not to tell us what those responses should be. We can guess for ourselves. And that engagement draws us deeper into a thicket of thorny, beautiful relationships.