Eve Mozell (Ryan) is a semi-responsible adult with a propensity for plowing into other people's cars while talking on her cell phone. (Cell phones are ubiquitous in the world of this film.) A wife and mother who runs not only an efficient household but also her own business as a party planner, Eve is kindhearted and compassionate, but prone to guilt, anxiety and self-doubt. And if just getting through the day weren't taxing enough, she bears the added burden of serving as sole emotional support and confessor for her aged father, Lou (Walter Matthau), a selfish, spoiled lush.
Eve's sisters have almost nothing to do with their father and are only too happy to leave that task to their peacemaker middle sibling. Older sister Georgia (Keaton) is a high-powered, self-absorbed magazine publisher revered by readers of her hip, New York-based women's magazine, which she self-reverentially christened Georgia. Maddy (Kudrow) is a barely successful soap-opera star. The baby of the family, she is well-meaning but clueless and turns to Eve for advice about almost everything.
The story opens with Eve taking her father to the hospital for some tests. Thereafter, every time the phone rings, Eve panics, convinced it's the hospital calling to tell her he's dead. The first time she reacts this way is acceptable, if predictable -- the film is filled with such moments of broad humor -- but the subsequent six times are just plain annoying.
Annoying is the nicest adjective that could be leveled at Lou. While the Ephrons may have intended him as a lovable old coot, he is anything but. Although flashbacks suggest he was an involved, devoted father to Eve, it's difficult to reconcile that image with his later on-screen behavior. A man more child than parent, he is constantly begging for pity and making inappropriate remarks to his kids. He is a creepy presence and a big miscalculation on the writers' part. He engenders not even a modicum of sympathy from the audience.
Eve's relationship with her sisters -- and with herself -- is as important as her relationship with her father, and, not surprisingly, the three are intertwined. But while sibling rivalry, low self-esteem, guilt and conflict over one's parents are easy for just about everyone to identify with, artifice overwhelms reality here. Not even Ryan, always a personable presence on-screen, makes us care. You have to wonder: Why isn't Eve in therapy? Let her bore someone else with her problems, not us.
Diane Keaton's feature directorial debut was the quirky, lovely Unstrung Heroes, a film that took bizarre characters and an unconventional story line and turned both into objects of genuine pathos. Hanging Up is designed to have a much broader appeal, but it lacks the depth of feeling and idiosyncratic charm of the earlier film. To a large degree, that's a result of the writing. Suffice it to say that the Ephron sisters acquitted themselves far more admirably in earlier comedies: You've Got Mail, on which they shared a writing credit; and When Harry Met Sally, which Nora penned alone.
Much of Hanging Up takes place on the telephone, an instrument that allows people to keep a safe distance from one another while still maintaining a connection. Increasingly, we live in a cell-phone culture, but the film seems far more interested in milking laughs from repeated shots of the sisters making or answering phone calls than from anything substantive.
In the film's defense, it must be said that the friend who accompanied me to the screening is the third child in a family of five sisters, and she definitely connected with some of the sibling interaction. But a good film should draw in audience members who don't share a similar background or living situation. It should make us care about who and what we are seeing on the screen, regardless of how different the lives portrayed might be from our own. And that is as true for comedies as it is for dramas.
