Hanging Up: Movie, DVD Review (2009)

Directed by Diane Keaton; written by Delia Ephron and Nora Ephron, 92 minutes, rated PG-13.

Dear Diane Keaton:

I recently caught your movie, “Hanging Up,” on cable, and feel well enough now to pass along my deepest sympathy and most heart-felt regrets.

I have to believe this erring bit of madness isn’t just your fault. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion a big part of your film’s cheap shots at women and rampant, muddled sentiment has less to do with your own surprising streak of misogyny, than it does with those harbingers of bad taste, those film hooligans of fluff, the Ephron sisters, Delia and Nora.

Certainly it was they who cajoled you into making a film about three hateful, troubled, selfish, self-involved, self-serving, rich, unlikable women who are such harried emotional wrecks, such cold climbers in their respective fields, they can’t possibly deal with themselves or with their dying father--and so they don’t. Not once.

And isn’t that what this film is supposed to be about? Meg Ryan, Lisa Kudrow and you dealing with Walter Matthau as a difficult, dying parent? Maybe it’s just me, but throughout, I couldn’t help noticing you never dealt with that issue. Certainly you kept brushing up against it the way a cat brushes up against a litter box, but in so doing, you essentially left your characters and your audience in an emotional lurch.

Forgive me for being blunt, but the experience of watching your film was trite.

This movie of yours, which the Ephrons adapted from Delia’s boring autobiographical book, has nothing to do with any tangible sort of human existence. It’s meant for rich, emotionally detached women who want nothing more than to have it all, but you and the Ephrons are boldly saying that women can’t have it all without first being a shrill mess of jumpy nerves. And even then, they fail.

It’s funny...and a little odd. Looking back at your career choices (I’ve been a fan since “Lovers and Other Strangers”), you never struck me as a traditionalist, but here you are stating just that in your fourth effort as a director.

What really perplexed me in “Hanging Up” isn’t just the fact that it’s being marketed as a comedy when it’s clearly a drama, but that it’s also being marketed for mainstream audiences when it only addresses a tiny percentage of that audience. Tell me, how do you expect anyone in the real world to identify with these women?

Meg Ryan’s co-dependent Eve drives a $70,000 Land Rover, lives in a great house and has a successful party planning business; Lisa Kudrow’s Maddy is a famous soap opera actress who couldn’t count to three even if somebody walked her through it; and your own character Georgia, the least likable of the bunch, is a super-rich, power hungry witch who has her own magazine empire (modestly named “Georgia”) and, apparently, no heart or conscience.

You might argue that audiences will identify with the dying-parent angle, which some certainly might, but what good is a dying, grumpy old man, or the knowledge that he was an abusive alcoholic who put his three daughters through hell, when you and the Ephrons choose to hastily resolve all their hurt and pain with a misty-eyed hug and a ridiculous, “feel-good” food fight at film’s end?

Your audience deserved better, Diane. They deserved some insight.

I don’t have to ask whose idea it was for Meg Ryan to behave like a manic squid. I’m sure that came from her. But couldn’t you have asked her to tone down her flailing arms and legs, hands and feet? Throughout, her fevered impersonation of herself isn’t just cliché, but as cloying as your insistence to keep these three on the telephone at all times, a device that interrupts any bit of flow and energy your film otherwise might have had.

Look--I’m sure right now you’re as exhausted as I was when I turned off the television and stepped away from your movie, so I’ll end with this: Don’t you think it’s curious that, for all the endless talking and chatter that goes on in “Hanging Up,” no one ever says anything meaningful? They just talk and talk and talk to shut out the world, to shut out their problems, and, naturally, to hear themselves talk. I’ve been thinking about that since I saw the movie.

Grade: F