Hanging Up (2000) – DVD

*/**** Image B Sound A- Extras C+
starring Meg Ryan, Diane Keaton, Lisa Kudrow, Walter Matthau
screenplay by Delia Ephron & Nora Ephron, based on the book by Delia
directed by Diane Keaton

by Bill Chambers In Hanging Up, only Eve, the middle child between two sisters, accepts responsibility for their ailing dad, and we wish that he–and his eldest and youngest daughters, for that matter–would die already so that Eve could go off and lead a life actually worth making/watching a movie about. As Eve, Meg Ryan is in typical perky-panic mode. What’s got her whipped into a tizzy this time? Well, a Nixon exhibit that she, a party planner, is hosting (a nod to co-writer Nora Ephron’s first husband, Watergate whistle-blower Carl Bernstein?), the impending death of her dementia-addled father (Walter Matthau, Dick Clark’s opposite in that he has always looked 80 years old), the fallout from a car accident, and the realization that her sisters (Diane Keaton and Lisa Kudrow) are complete and utter parasites are all converging at once. Eve juggles her responsibilities over the telephone, through convoluted multi-line conversations that give the film its title as well as its raison d’être.

Eve is married to an incredibly boring potato played by Adam Arkin, and I envision a better film in which she drops him like a hot schlub for Indian doctor Omar Kunundar (Duke Moosekian), who cuts her some slack after she rear-ends his vehicle. Moosekian is by far the most captivating person in Hanging Up, but he’s ultimately too foreign for this blonde world, which posits the phone as a way to reach out and touch someone but really represents the closed-circuit that is this self-absorbed family.

There is familiarity to Hanging Up but it’s not the cozy kind. Ryan’s casting, for instance, just feels like an Ephron crutch. Ephron and her sister Delia loosely based their screenplay on the experience of looking after their late father, screenwriter Henry Ephron, who had become prone to comically abusing his telephone privileges in his lonely final days. That’s material for a winning essay and maybe even a memoir, but as a movie it doesn’t have anywhere to go, and the comedy isn’t brash enough–hence director Keaton taking everything to a frenzied pitch that’s the poor man’s version of funny. (She sometimes does this as a performer, too.) Meanwhile, the Ephrons, stuck with characters who are trapped in a holding pattern, pad their script with superfluous flashbacks and bedside blather. Phone calls and hospital rooms: the stuff of cinema!

Hanging Up culminates in a three-way fight among the sisters at Thanksgiving that’s also an example of delayed gratification, as Keaton and Kudrow finally share the frame with Ryan. And what do they do? They throw flour at her. It was that or sing into a hairbrush, I guess. There’s something dire and phony about this tableau of ra-ra sisterhood: we’ve barely met Keaton’s Georgia or Kudrow’s Maddy, so the filmmakers are putting way too much stock in the actresses’ typecasting as a narcissist and an airhead, respectively, as if a family dynamic will materialize out of memories of other movies and TV shows. It’s a misdirect from the pall of mortality that, er, hangs over the film besides. Hanging Up is the sort of depressed Neil Simon dramedy Marsha Mason and Mary Tyler Moore might’ve made in the early ’80s, hammered into the shape of a Meg Ryan comedy. Let the machine get it.

THE DVD
Hanging Up‘s scatterbrained agenda may be the result of a studio patch job (it tested poorly), and Columbia’s DVD release, with its supplemental inclusion of a madcap nine-minute deleted sequence, gives no indication to the contrary. First, the audio/video quality: Available in 16×9-enhanced, 1.85:1 widescreen and full-frame versions (each offering slightly more information than the other where one would assume) on the same side of an RSDL disc, the film’s presentation ranges from adequate to excellent, depending on cinematographer Howard Atherton’s lighting scheme. Some scenes are awash in hazy, filtered sunlight that mutes the contrast to an eye-straining degree. Compression artifacts in the form of banding are evident during the opening credits.

The 5.1 Dolby Digital mix is predictably dialogue-driven, and voices are clear and properly centred. David Hirschfelder’s score is spread out nicely across the soundstage. (You can listen to it in isolation on track three, where its cues remain in sync with the on-screen action.) A slightly lower-fidelity Dolby Surround mix is the default track. Other bonus material: a five-minute “gag reel” of outtakes, a weightless 12-minute HBO First Look making-of (which features, oddly, the same intro as the gag reel), production notes, and trailers for Sleepless in Seattle (full-frame, 2.0) and Hanging Up (1.85:1, 5.1). Possibly too much to squeeze onto one side of even a dual-layered platter, hence the abovementioned banding. Note: Hanging Up is available individually or in a two-pack with Sleepless in Seattle.

95 minutes; PG-13; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced), 1.33:1; English DD 5.1, English Dolby Surround; CC; English subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Columbia TriStar