(The Keaton Files is my possibly self-flagellating attempt at watching every feature film in Diane Keaton’s baffling 21st-century filmography. Spoilers should be expected.)
It’s a fascinating experience to watch a movie that touches upon universal themes of losing a parent, sibling resentment, and the endless juggling of responsibilities, and yet wonder if it perhaps takes place on Mars. Hanging Up wants to be a sassy-yet-insightful comedy-drama about a dysfunctional family, but it’s a shrill jumble of slapstick, tears, wisecracks, and heartfelt moments, sometimes all in the same scene. If it could physically pick up the viewer by their ankles and shake emotions out of them, it would.
Written by Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron (and directed by Diane Keaton), Hanging Up takes place in an alternate universe version of Los Angeles, where only white people live there and it takes just five minutes to drive anywhere. Lou Mozell (Walter Matthau) is slowly dying of some unspecified old person’s disease which may be Alzheimer’s, but also sometimes causes him not to be able to walk. Evie (Meg Ryan), Lou’s dutiful middle daughter, is forced to loop in her sisters, bossy Georgia (Keaton) and ditzy Maddie (Lisa Kudrow), as to the gravity of the situation. If you’re wondering how it’s possible that Walter Matthau could be the father of Meg Ryan, Diane Keaton, and Lisa Kudrow, let me clarify that Cloris Leachman briefly appears as their mother, and presumably birthed them directly from her forehead.
ANYWAY, bringing the sisters together to face the possible impending death of their elderly father proves a challenge. Evie is a professional party planner, Maddie is a soap opera actress, and Georgia runs a magazine named for herself (relatable!). They’re extremely busy all the time, constantly reminding each other and other characters how busy they are, and all we really know about them is that they’re very, very busy and don’t have time to deal with anything but how busy they are. Wait, scratch that: they do have time for one thing, and that’s being condescending to each other and insisting that no one could possibly be as busy as them.
Fully half of the movie is the three of them on the phone with each other, either arguing about how busy they are, or having to hang up and take another call. The concept of voicemail (let alone email) doesn’t seem to exist in this universe, even though it’s predominantly set in the present (well, 2000). It literally takes the frazzled Evie nearly having a nervous breakdown before she finally refuses to answer her phone, and it’s treated as some shocking moment of rebellion.
Let me be clear: watching Evie slowly fall apart while her awful sisters either blow her off or yammer about their own problems is supposed to be the funny part, as is Evie falling out of bed in a panic to answer her phone in the middle of the night, because maybe the President might be calling to let her know the missiles have just launched or something. The pathos comes in Evie reflecting on her complicated relationship with Lou, as illustrated in a flashback where a drunk Lou crashes Evie’s young son’s birthday party and emotionally abuses Evie. The scene comes off like nothing so much as a PSA on addressing one’s crippling drinking problem, and it’s wedged into a light-hearted comedy that ends with a food fight. Though Ryan and Matthau are actually rather good in their sad scenes together, they fit into the rest of the plot with the finesse of someone trying to jam an oversized package into a post office night deposit box.
Hanging Up was based on Delia Ephron’s book of the same name, and presumably (hopefully) it fleshes out more of the characters’ lives than what we get here. Evie has a child we almost never see, and a husband (Adam Arkin) who just grumbles in dismay and then conveniently leaves on a business trip, never to be seen again. We know almost nothing about Maddie except that she has an untrained dog she alternately adores and ignores, and even less about Georgia, other than she’s famous for…some reason or another, it’s not entirely clear, but it’s enough that she’s able to run a successful magazine named after herself. We get no sense of how either of them feel about the situation, or their father, or the mother who abandoned them, other than they’re simply too busy to deal with any of it.
Wearing power bangs and a series of tastefully boring Donna Karan suits, if you told me Diane Keaton filmed all of her scenes in one day, I would believe it. That’s not a slight against her, just that she’s given almost nothing to work with other than a character who’s meant to be loathsome, until suddenly she isn’t anymore. Hanging Up pats itself on the back for addressing serious problems like alcoholism, dementia, and family trauma, and then suggests that it can all be resolved with a single heart-to-heart conversation and cooking Thanksgiving dinner together. Paper-thin characters are the least of its problems.