Hanging Up (2000)

reviewed by
Michael Redman

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Hanging Up

A film review by Michael Redman
Copyright 2000 by Michael Redman

** (out of ****)

What is the poet said about humans and rodents and how their plans usually gets screwed up?

The distance between how a project looks in our head and how it acts in real life is often so vast that even the best ideas can't make the leap. We spend hours and hours working out the scheme, detailing the minutia and then it just doesn't work.

Not surprisingly our expectations and hopes are so high that we can't even see that it's not working...for a while at least. We want the thing to be good so it looks good to us. Until the slow realization of reality sinks in.

That's exactly what happens with "Hanging Up". It sounds great and has all the elements to be a wonderful movie. I expected and wanted to enjoy it. But then chaos theory set in. A butterfly flaps its wings in Japan and the film sinks.

Eve (Meg Ryan) has a full life running her own business and taking care of her family, but her obsession is caring for her dying alcoholic father (Walter Matthau). Her self-absorbed sisters Georgia (Diane Keaton) and Maddy (Lisa Kudrow) aren't much help. Georgia carries on a love affair with her cell phone while publishing her women's magazine (entitled, what else, "Georgia"). Maddy's life revolves around her soap opera role.

This all must have looked so good on paper. What an ultimate "chick flick"! Screenwriter Nora Ephron has a string of hits. Keaton, who also directs, has good instincts and her directoral efforts have earned prestigious awards.

The casting of the women was genius. All three have at least partially built their careers on playing the same scattered but appealing hot babe. It's not a stretch to imagine a younger Keaton in "When Harry Met Sally". Or a younger Ryan fitting in with the cast of "Friends". Keaton and Ryan both captivate the screen in most of their roles and Kudrow isn't too annoying in small doses.

Matthau has spent half of his life playing crotchety old men and he does it better than anyone. No one else can so convincingly lie in a hospital bed yet still have the energy to grab asses.

There are a few touching moments. Dad comes home drunk during a birthday party and everyone in the audience feels Eve's pain and embarrassment.

When absent mother (Cloris Leachman) explains she left the family because motherhood just didn't take and Eve returns home, your heart sinks. You know she's going to take her mother's place in the family and the emotional deadend that leads to. Her relationship with her father is the one convincing aspect of the film, although you would think that sometime during the past 10 years she would have run into one of those thousands of books on codependency.

What goes wrong? Just about everything. The actors are all more than adequate but with the exception of Ryan and Matthau, no one really connects with each other. Rarely do the women come across as sisters. Maddy and Georgia aren't fully fleshed-out characters. None of the men are anything other than place-holders. Matthau is great, but he's merely a cartoon.

The script contributes little towards creating real people. Most of the time the conversations fall flat even when supposedly passionate. The story ("I've devoted my life to my father and now he's dying") has the potential for a deep look into the human psyche and connecting with a large number of the audience but seldom gets beyond superficial.

The film isn't horrendous. The dangers of being electronically and/or emotionally overly connected and at everyone's beck and call 24 hours a day says something to the modern American. The actors are fun to watch and some of the scenes work well. Occasionally the humor hits home.

Unfortunately none of it clicks together as a whole. Bits and pieces, but not a satisfying film. Oddly enough, for a movie that supposedly deals with how we relate to each other, what we have here is a failure to communicate.

(Michael Redman has written this column since before the dawn of time and has to confess that, for possibly the first time, his favorite film of last year was nominated for an Oscar. Comments about American Beauty can be sent to redman@bluemarble.net.)

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