Hanging Up film review

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HANGING UP

American writer Margaret Turnbull once quipped: "No man is responsible for his father. That is entirely his mother's affair". So what happens when mom decides that enough is enough and moves out? Who's going to look after the stubborn, crotchety old buzzard then?

In Diane Keaton's slice-of-family-life, Hanging Up, that dubious honour falls to Eve (Meg Ryan), a daddy's girl-turned-professional party organiser who has seen her parents go through a messy divorce and now tries to be on call for her cantankerous old man, Lou (Walter Matthau), day or night.

Despite having a family of her own - husband Joe (Adam Arkin) and little boy Jesse (Jesse James) - Eve automatically drops everything whenever Lou 'phones, putting her professional and personal life on hold to attend to his every need, particularly now that he has been booked into a Los Angeles Hospital.

Eve's sisters are too absorbed in their own petty traumas to worry about their father. Eldest daughter Georgia (Diane Keaton) runs her own self-titled woman's magazine and is something of an icon to frustrated housewives across America.

Meanwhile youngest sis Maddy (Lisa Kudrow) has carved out a minor niche as a B-list soap opera actress - if only someone would recognise her and ask for her autograph. The three women talk constantly to one another on the telephone, finally coming together in the City of Angels when Lou's health deteriorates, by which time Eve has been run ragged and tempers are frayed to say the least.

Based on Delia Ephron's semi-autobiographical bestseller of the same name, Hanging Up is a mildly diverting chick flick about the unspoken fears and needs which bind families, and the self-destructive natures of some children to try to please their parents.

Ryan plays another variation on the kooky blonde, tearing about the film like some whirling dervish in order to make Lou's life as comfortable as possible, which usually means making her own a misery.

She compels us to sympathise with Eve's plight, overcompensating for the absence of her mother Pat (Cloris Leachman), and heaping more and more responsibility onto her already full plate.

Keaton plays Georgia with a wink and a nod as an insufferable egotist who believes that the universe revolves around her, and Kudrow works hard to flesh out her badly underwritten role, demonstrating her impeccable comic talents in a couple of excerpts from her outrageously trashy television show.