The Oscars: Anne Hathaway

Watching Rachel Getting Married is like showing up at a friends dinner party and watching his family fall into disarray. Personal grievances get aired. Family secrets spill across the table. Hurt relatives say things to one another that can never be taken back. You witness all of this, an outsider forced to sit uncomfortably as the party disintegrates.

Kym (Anne Hathaway) has come home for her sister Rachel's wedding. Kym's been in rehab for all of eight months. She learns soon after getting home that she won't be her sister's maid of honor -- this from a guy she met and screwed in the garage. Later, at the rehearsal dinner, she snatches a cordless mic to toast her sister, but her toast turns into this rambling atonement (one of the "12 Steps"). She's self-deprecating and open in a way that makes the entire room uncomfortable. You want to turn away from this because it's so damn raw.

But that's not the half of it. There's a scene that comes much later. Rachel is sitting with her father and friends assigning seats for the reception. She's placed Kym with some distant cousins. When Kym arrives, she lounges just outside the circle, lights a cigarette and asks, "Where'd you put me." "With the family," her father answers. "But that would mean there are 13 people at that table and Rachel wanted 12," Rachel's best friend says.

Hathaway offers a devastatingly acute performance as recovering addict Kym haunted by guilt over the death of her brother. Her work here is head-and-shoulders above the sometimes cartoonish Meryl Streep in Doubt and just a cut above the superb Angelina Jolie in Changeling. I'll see Kate Winslet in The Reader this weekend, but if some of the critics are correct in saying Winslet is better in the snubbed Revolutionary Road performance, I won't be disappointed if Hathaway pulls an upset in the lead actress category Sunday night at the Academy Awards.