Hanging Up is a 2000 American comedy drama film about a trio of sisters bonding over their curmudgeon father, with whom none are close. It is directed by Diane Keaton, and stars Keaton, Meg Ryan, Lisa Kudrow and Walter Matthau (in his final film role). The film is based on Delia Ephron's 1995 novel. It was released on February 18, 2000, and received negative reviews from critics.
Plot
Georgia Mozell, Eve Marks and Maddy Mozell are adult sisters. Self-obsessed Georgia is the editor of her wildly successful self-titled women's magazine. Maddy is a vacuous soap opera actress who has always struggled for her own identity. Party planner Eve struggles to balance her family life with her career while also caring for their father. All three sisters are still wounded by their parents' divorce after many years of acrimony, a split that resulted in their mother Pat essentially abandoning them all.
Despite being as busy with her own life as the others, Eve is the only one of the three who deals with the long-term hospitalization of their cantankerous 79-year-old father Lou Mozell when he enters the early stages of dementia and has to be hospitalized. Lou has a history of alcoholism and womanizing, and, despite a hurtful incident years earlier, Eve takes charge of her father's care. In addition to answering his frequent, often incoherent phone calls, she visits him in the hospital nearly every day. Maddy occasionally visits as well, but also saddles Eve with the care of her large dog Buck. Eve is so distracted that she has a car accident with Dr. Omar Kunundar.
Flashbacks show Eve, Maddy and Georgia visiting Lou one Christmas after he attempted suicide after Pat left him. Eve confronts her mother, who admits that she had children only because she believed that having children was what was normal, but eventually discovered that it was not what she actually wanted out of life. She goes back to her father, and they go shopping together for a Christmas tree. Lou's joyful nature helps Eve to forget the pain of her mother's rejection.
In another flashback, Lou drunkenly crashes the birthday party of Eve's young son Jesse, and when Eve tells him to leave, he angrily tells her that she was a mistake. Eve's husband, outraged, forces Lou to leave and declares that he is no longer welcome in their house.
Overwhelmed with caring for her father, her siblings and an especially demanding client, Eve disconnects all the phones in her house on the advice of Omar's mother Ogmed after they talk to discuss what to do about the car crash. At an event that Eve planned at which Georgia is the keynote speaker, Georgia uses Lou's illness to promote her magazine and claims that she has been more involved in his care than she actually is. Afterward, Maddy, Eve and Georgia argue viciously until they are halted by the news that Lou's health has worsened.
The three sisters rush to the hospital and reconcile at their father's bedside. As they wait for Lou to emerge from a coma, they try to remember the name of an actress whose name Eve has been struggling to recall for weeks. Lou, who suddenly comes out of his coma, says, "June Allyson", and dies.
At the subsequent Thanksgiving, Eve, Maddy and Georgia are together in Eve's kitchen. Eve teaches Georgia how to make her stuffing recipe, which Georgia had previously stolen and given to a newspaper as hers. Georgia and Maddy begin to playfully throw flour at each other, and Eve takes a moment to enjoy being together with her sisters before joining the fun.
The film was released in the United States on February 18, 2000. It made $15.7 million over the opening four-day Presidents' Day weekend, finishing second behind The Whole Nine Yards.[citation needed]Hanging Up opened in 2,618 theaters at an average of exactly $6,000. It dropped out of the top 10 in its third week of release, and lasted eight weeks in its domestic release.[citation needed]
The film made $36.1 million in the United States and Canada, and $15.8 million in other territories, for a worldwide total to $51.9 million.[2]
Critical response
On Rotten TomatoesHanging Up holds an approval rating of 12%, based on 85 reviews, with an average rating of 3.75/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "Though the screenplay and the novel it's based on were both written by the same person, critics say Hanging Up is an unsuccessful adaptation. The acting is praised as solid, but is ultimately unable to save the film."[3]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 33 out of 100, based on 30 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews.[4] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C" on a scale of A+ to F.
