Hanging Up (2000)

★★
Nora Ephron's name will most likely forever be linked with chick flicks. It's ironic that her best work has nothing to do with that genre. In 1983 she co-wrote Silkwood, a fine film based on the true story of a nuclear factory employee uncovering corruption at the plant. Another notable film is My Blue Heaven (1990), starring Steve Martin as an oddball gangster hiding away while he awaits his court appearance. Ephron sometimes hits the target and dishes out something worth watching (1996's Michael), but lately I have found her films, whether written and/or directed by her, too cute for my tastes. I was unimpressed with her wildly popular Sleepless in Seattle (1993), and You've Got Mail (1998) was weak too. Now, she and her sister Delia have cowritten Hanging Up, which was directed by Diane Keaton, and again Ephron has created something with a warm and fuzzy exterior but with a shallow interior.

The movie was based on a novel by Delia Ephron. Meg Ryan stars as Eve Marks, a busy mother, wife and caregiver to her father, Lou (Walter Matthau). She has two other sisters named Maddy (Lisa Kudrow) and Georgia (Diane Keaton), and the running theme throughout the story is that they are constantly on the phone with each other and "hanging up" because of their busy lives. I suppose it's a reference to working women and how they are taking on more responsibilities, but that theme has nothing to do with the movie's real reason for being. This movie examines the relationship between father and daughter and how the daughter feels to watch him slip away in a hospital bed. The problem is that Eve is the only one who watches over him. Maddy shows up occasionally, and Georgia seems to be in another movie altogether.

Georgia runs her own magazine named after her, but the movie hardly ever visits her, probably because of Keaton's directorial duties. Towards the end, in the movie's worst scene, she publicly announces her sadness because of her father's illness. Prior to this, she had never visited her father in the hospital. I'm not sure what Keaton or the Ephrons were trying to say here, but I know they succeeded in making Georgia into someone for whom we couldn't possibly care. Lisa Kudrow is okay as Maddy, though she's starting to play the same perky character in all her movies (Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, Analyze This). Only Meg Ryan and Walter Matthau shine—they practically carry this busy film on their shoulders. They have some good moments together, and that is the story's only saving grace. In fact, their scenes are so good that I can't help but wonder why the film didn't just stay with Eve and Lou. The distracting theme of ringing phones and hanging up doesn't serve any other purpose, except to prove that too many characters in movies have cellular phones.

I was reminded of another film that examined the relationship between father and daughter. That was Say Anything... (1989), which is a different kind of movie that tackled several plots but ultimately never veered from its narrative course. Hanging Up seems well-intentioned, but it doesn't have the same focus. Eventually, the three daughters wind up in the hospital room, but since Maddy and especially Georgia never committed themselves on visiting their father before, their presence in the hospital seems like a sappy ending forced into the movie. There are some touching flashback sequences, some involving a young Eve with her father, but the movie never builds up to an emotional ending.

Hanging Up is just too busy with its theme of working women that it distances itself from the more important look at Eve and how she copes with her dying father. There's some workable material here, and if Nora and Delia decided to examine more closely at how the three daughters might have really been affected by their ill father, then the movie could have succeeded. Instead, this is just a mildly humorous, yet ultimately disappointing crowd-pleaser designed to further the reputation of Nora Ephron as a writer of chick flicks.

© 2000 Silver Screen Reviews