Hanging UP
A film review by
Linda Lopez McAlister
Saturday, February 19, 2000

A new film by and about women opened in theaters around Tampa Bay yesterday. It's called "Hanging Up" and if I were handicapping it the way they do race horses by its pedigree, I would have to like it. It was written by Delia and Nora Ephron who are among my favorite mainstream film writers because their scripts are usually well written, funny, and vaguely feminist. It stars tried and true actors such as Meg Ryan, Diane Keaton, Lisa Kudrow, and Walter Matthau. And it marks the directorial debut of Diane Keaton who has been around filmmaking long enough and is smart enough to be able to guide such a film, one would think.

The story is about three sisters: Eve (Meg Ryan) who is a Beverly Hills wife and mother with her own party planning business; Maddie (Lisa Kudrow) who is an actor on a soap opera; and Georgia (Keaton) who is the high profile, high powered elder sister, the founder and publisher of "Georgia" the magazine celebrating its fifth year of competing with Vogue and Cosmo. And its about their father who is a raunchy and unhappy 79 but fading fast.

Evie is the one on whom the burden of care and worry about her father falls hardest and she has a whole host of mixed emotions about him, about the mother who left the marriage when she was a child, and her absentee sisters. Most of their communication is done by cell phone and there is, indeed, a lot of hanging up on one another as these busy women try to communicate while on the go.

You'd think that this situation would be a perfect one for a film to elicit both laughs and tears. Well, I'm an all time champion crier in movies-I've even been known to tear up at the occasional tv commercial-so I was prepared for a multi Kleenex evening. But it never came. Nor were there a lot of laughs, either. And, to my mind, those are flaws in this film. It should have made me laugh and cry. I think the fact that it didn't has to be laid at the feet of the director, Diane Keaton and/or the editor. Because the characters are frantic, the film is too, at least at the beginning. Evie's reactions are exaggerated and, therefore, unbelievable. The same is true for the other sisters. Some exaggeration in a film such as this is perhaps a good thing, but here they go too far, with the result that the audience has a hard time connecting to them as real people. And, failing that identification, the film is ultimately unsatisfying. It's just Meg and Lisa and Diane up there hoking it up and never allowing us to identify with genuine emotion.

I couldn't help wondering if "Hanging UP" would have been different if Nora Ephron were behind the camera. We'll never know, but it needed the steady hand of a confident director who could encourage the actors to really feel the emotions of their characters, not just to "indicate" them as they do here.

For the WMNF Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women and Film.

opyright 2000 by Linda Lopez McAlister. All rights reserved. Please do not reprint or reproduce this review without the permission of the author: mcalister@chuma1.cas.usf.edu