In family, screenwriter sees true colors of connection

She puts life lessons into 'Rachel Getting Married'

Jenny Lumet (right, with star Anne Hathaway) is the writer behind ''Rachel Getting Married.'' (Joe tabacca for the boston globe)

NEW YORK - You'd think an interracial wedding in a staid Connecticut suburb might be noted in conversations there. Discussed, even. In "Rachel Getting Married," which opens Friday, it doesn't muster a mention.

"I was really relieved that the movie never touched on race," says Anne Hathaway, who stars as a drug addict returning home from rehab to attend her sister Rachel's wedding. "That's what my group of friends looks like and we don't sit around talking about race - we're just friends who know each other's backgrounds so those conversations don't have to happen anymore."

Jenny Lumet, the author of the screenplay, says that given her family background, it seemed natural that an interracial couple would play a central role in her movie.

Lumet's mother, Gail Lumet Buckley, is black and the daughter of the singer Lena Horne. Her father, the director Sidney Lumet, is Jewish. Jenny Lumet's current husband, who is the father of her 5-month-old daughter, is "a nice Jewish boy," and her first husband, the actor Bobby Cannavale, the father of her 13-year-old son, is of Cuban descent. "I think of them as very, very American - those children of mine," she says.

In any case, she insists the idea to cast a black actor in the role of the groom came from the film's director, Jonathan Demme

"If you look at Jonathan Demme's stuff, he casts in a completely embracing way," Lumet says. "Personally, I think that's what a family and America looks like. I think the other stuff - where everyone looks the same - is just a myth. That being said, the only time I ever thought about the race issue when writing the script was when I thought about making the characters of Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt) and Kym (Hathaway) the children of an interracial couple. But I decided not to because I was afraid people would say that that was the reason Kym became a crazy drug person. And of course, that's not the reason people use drugs."

And while she says she didn't set out to make a statement about race, the fact that the movie has come out at a time when the country has its first black presidential nominee has created some buzz.

"I must be psychic because I figured all this out four years ago when I wrote the movie," she laughs. "But I do think this is an Obama movie because of the multicultural-ness and because he is someone who wants to promote healing through openness."

To be sure, the film's characters are not short on problems to tackle, which is perhaps why race doesn't merit any airtime. A central crisis from the past has driven each of the characters to create coping mechanisms, which are often unsuccessful. Kym's mechanism is drug addiction, and it becomes the primary focus of the family.

"The conflict in this film is so intense," says Hathaway. "Here you have a girl who's struggling with sobriety and in order to be sober, she has to be honest. And in order to be with her family, she can't be honest because they're demanding that she not be herself - that she just pretend. The level of conflict got me really excited."

For Lumet, writing the script was a way of putting an aspect of everyday life into words. "I think families are demented, and to ignore the material God gave you is a huge mistake," she says. "Everybody knows someone who is in recovery or who is addicted or who is just a notorious pain."

The typicalness of the family's issues in "Rachel" is highlighted by the filming style, in which handheld cameras were used exclusively to give the film a home-movie appearance. "It was like doing theater with the camera there to capture it," Hathaway says.

Because the issues in the film are so raw and painful, Hathaway says she hopes it helps people gain an appreciation of other people's humanity. "What I take away from this movie is that we are all so much more complicated and fragile than we give each other credit for," she says. "And we all have a sad story. So when you meet someone, they're not just the person sitting in front of you, they are the collective of their past leading them to this moment."

Lumet says she didn't have a clear message in mind when she wrote the script, which was her first and only screenplay to be made into a film. In fact, the movie came out far better and more poignant than she imagined, thanks to Demme's involvement, she says. "There I was, writing this script, heating up chicken nuggets for my son who was watching 'SpongeBob' and in my hubris I thought, this is going to be a movie and Jonathan Demme is going to direct it. . . . I am extremely lucky that it worked out that way."

One thing that did turn out exactly as Lumet planned was the movie's long-awaited wedding. The ceremony is inexplicably Indian (the bride and bridesmaids wear saris) and Brazilian dancers entertain wildly at the reception. Just as the mixed-race status of the bridal couple is never addressed, no one in the film questions or explains the reason for the wedding's multicultural trappings.

"I really don't know why I included those details," Lumet says. "I wanted a central and sexy wedding. And whenever I see those weddings with the bride in a white dress and everything's supposed to be pristine - that's exactly the kind of wedding I want to screw up. Because when anything is perfect I just want to mess it up. And so I wanted Rachel's wedding to be free and sexy - I wanted it to be alive."