Make ‘Riding in Cars with Boys’ and ‘Rachel Getting Married’ Your Expiring Netflix Double Feature

Expiring from Netflix streaming on March 1st are two movies that tried to do similar things for two actresses: Drew Barrymore‘s Riding in Cars with Boys and Anne Hathaway‘s Rachel Getting Married. They experienced varying degrees of success, and one is a much better movie than the other, but watched back-to-back, they make for an interesting look at actresses who were seen as frivolous attempting to add some gravitas to their respective images.

It can be hard for an actor to break out of the mold they’ve created for themselves; particularly actors who make their first mark as children. Almost always, there’s the part where the former youth star makes a stab for legitimacy by taking a serious, dramatic, often dark role. Sometimes it works, in which case there are fabulous new opportunities for the actor on the horizon. Sometimes it doesn’t work, though, and the actor has to go make another Charlie’s Angels sequel. For example.

By the time she made Riding in Cars with Boys, Drew Barrymore was a hard-won 25 years old, having already gone through massive early fame at age 7 with E.T., drug and alcohol abuse and eventually rehab by 14, a comeback by 20, and her first production credit in 1999 for Never Been Kissed. Still, the movie roles in her comeback had all narrowed into Drew’s a sweet, sprightly, kooky persona. She had some big hits with that persona (The Wedding Singer; Charlie’s Angels), but clearly she was looking for some legitimacy as an actress when she took the role as Beverly Donofrio in Riding in Cars with Boys, based on the author’s memoir.

In the film, Barrymore plays Beverly from the ages of 15 to 35, becoming a teenage single mother struggling to build a life for herself with a doofy deadbeat husband (why yes, he was played by Steve Zahn) and a son whom she’s not sure she loves for a while. There’s a lot more to it, actually, including Brittany Murphy as Bev’s best friend who also gets pregnant, and a nesting flashback structure with adult Bev and her 20-year-old son falling for Murphy’s grown-up daughter (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal!), and college courses and heroin addiction, and Rosie Perez, and grown-up Beverly has this haircut:

It … doesn’t really work. But, directed by Penny Marshall, there’s a kind of kitchen-sink charm to the movie, and Brittany Murphy and Steve Zahn are quite good. Truth be told, one of the biggest problems ends up being Barrymore, who can’t quite pull off the complicated emotions of Beverly over the years and instead just comes across as bitter and jerky without a whole lot of nuance. Also the movie is pretty long!

But you should stick through it because the second movie in your double-feature is Rachel Getting Married, and that movie is fantastic.This would be Anne Hathaway’s big stab at legitimacy after getting famous as the star of The Princess Diaries. (Interesting tidbit: Penny Marshall directed Riding in Cars with Boys in 2001, the same year that her brother Garry had a huge hit with the first Princess Diaries movie. Riding was a flop, and Penny hasn’t directed since, while Garry has been allowed to direct five movies since then, even though one of them was Georgia Rule.)

In Rachel, Hathaway plays Kym, a former teen model and current resident of rehab who’s getting sprung for the weekend to attend her sister’s wedding. Kym’s family, as we see them, are warm and kind of delightful, but everybody’s haunted to one degree or another. Rosemarie DeWitt, Bill Irwin, Debra Winger, and Anna Deavere Smith are uniformly fantastic as Rachel’s family, but it’s Hathaway who blew critics away. There’s a rehearsal dinner scene early on where Kym delivers a toast that goes on forever as she inevitably makes Rachel’s big day all about her dysfunction. It’s unbearable to watch if you possess any shred of empathy but it’s also pretty brilliant. Also, at one point, her hair looks like this, but it’s a much better fit for the story:

Hathaway got her first ever Oscar nomination for the performance, though the fact that the movie didn’t get any other nominations is kind of an outrage. Particularly with nominations aplenty for stuff like Doubt. (Not that it’s still a sore spot for anyone.)

For as much as Hathaway would become a magnet for awards-circuit criticism during her Les Miserables run, one viewing of Rachel Getting Married is enough to look past any needy personality quirks or “It came true” Oscar speeches.

[Watch Riding In Cars With Boys on Netflix]
[Watch Rachel Getting Married on Netflix]

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