I never met Diane Keaton, but the news of her passing hit me hard. I was kind of surprised, in fact, by the intensity of my reaction. Then I looked over her credits. Of course I was upset. First there were all those Woody Allen movies, some of them dating back to my long-ago youth, which ranged from wacky and wonderful comedies like Sleeper and Love and Death to the frankly preposterous Bergman-influenced Interiors to Manhattan (problematic, but oh, the gorgeous music and cinematography!) to Manhattan Murder Mystery, that surprisingly entertaining tale of an aging Upper East Side couple who become amateur sleuths. (RELATED: When the Movie Legends Die)
And let’s not forget Annie Hall, the groundbreaking romantic comedy that made Keaton a star, won her an Oscar, and changed women’s fashion into the bargain. Away from Woody Allen, Keaton was the emotional linchpin in the three Godfather movies; she provided the human element in Warren Beatty’s otherwise largely preachy political epic, Reds; she was charming in Baby Boom, moving in Shoot the Moon, darkly gripping in Looking for Mr. Goodbar; and she lent both heart and hilarity to The First Wives’ Club. And that’s just a fraction of her filmography.
Then there’s Hanging Up, which came out 25 years ago and which was the second — and better known — of the two feature films that Keaton directed. (She also wrote and directed a 1987 documentary, Heaven, about notions of the afterlife.) Adapted from a novel by Delia Ephron and with a script by Delia and her sister Nora, Hanging Up has the humor and sentiment of the latter Ephron’s best directorial outings, notably Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail, and Julie & Julia. A poignant family story, it’s patently autobiographical, based on Nora and Delia’s relationship with their parents, Henry and Phoebe Ephron, the script-writing team behind such workmanlike pictures as There’s No Business Like Show Business and Desk Set.
Hanging Up stars Meg Ryan as Eve Marks, a wife, mother, and party planner in L.A. who is too emotionally giving for her own good; Lisa Kudrow as her younger sister, Maddie Mozell, a soap-opera actress who is something of a flibbertigibbet; and Keaton as their older sister, Georgia, an egocentric Oprah-like figure whose women’s magazine, Georgia, has made her an icon. Early in the film, their funny, cantankerous father, Lou Mozell (Walter Matthau), has to be hospitalized for Alzheimer’s; although he hasn’t always gotten along with his daughters, Eve can’t let go of the sweet memories of her childhood (which form the stuff of several flashbacks), when he showered all three of them with love.
Years ago, we learn, Lou’s wife, Pat (Cloris Leachman), left him — and at the same time abandoned her daughters — and when Eve visits her in an attempt to prod her into caring about the current travails of her ex-husband and three children, Pat chillingly informs her that she never really wanted to be a mother and that she really doesn’t want to hear about any of them. It’s a powerful scene, countering the beloved cliche that a mother will always do anything for her children. On the contrary, there are mothers and there are mothers, and you never know what you’re going to get. A mother of a murderous innercity gang member will show up at his trial and beg the judge to have mercy on her “baby”; a mother of a loving son who’s striven all his life to make her proud will unaccountably turn against him and look at him in precisely the heartless way that Pat looks at Eve.
Pat is a dramatic contrast to Lou, who, although hardly perfect — after she left him, he became a nasty drunk who was given to ugly outbursts that ultimately caused a family rift — is, at his core, a genuinely loving father. In his old age he may occasionally lash out in confusion and frustration at his girls, but his adoration of them is rock-solid. Watching Hanging Up, one is impressed that two feminists wrote, and another feminist directed, this story in which a mother is depicted very unflatteringly, while a father, for all his personal failings, is celebrated in the last reel with love and gratitude.
Alas, not everybody who saw this movie when it came out was as fond of it as I am. Typical of the responses were the notice in Variety by Emanuel Levy, who called it a “shamelessly sappy” picture that “bears the schmaltzy sensibility of Nora Ephron,” and the review in the New York Post by my friend Jonathan Foreman, who called it a “depressing, trite and mawkishly Hollywood story.” Well, I can see their points: there’s definitely a bit too much maudlin stuff here for some people’s tastes, not to mention a number of strenuous efforts to be cutesy.
[T]he appeal of Hanging Up is that the aspects of it that most of the reviewers found “sappy” and “schmaltzy” and “mawkish” are precisely the things that make me a sucker for it.
As for the Nora Ephron touch, which is exemplified in Sleepless in Seattle, for example, by the use of the sentimental old song “Make Someone Happy” over the closing scene, it’s manifested here by the use of the equally sentimental “Once Upon a Time” (“Once upon a time / the world was sweeter than we knew…”) at the very end. I can also understand the viewers, by the way, who complained that it was impossible to buy Keaton (b. 1946) as a character who was supposed to be very close in age to Ryan (b. 1961) and Kudrow (b. 1963). Then again, as a fan of old movies like Random Harvest — in which Ronald Colman, who was 50 years old when the film was made, was, in its earliest scenes, supposed to be a World War I officer who was at most about half that age — I’m accustomed to having to suspend disbelief when it comes to such matters.
In any event, for me, the appeal of Hanging Up is that the aspects of it that most of the reviewers found “sappy” and “schmaltzy” and “mawkish” are precisely the things that make me a sucker for it. Most of my favorite movies are tearjerkers from the 1930s through the 1950s, such as Now, Voyager; An Affair to Remember (of which Sleepless in Seattle was a knockoff); Goodbye, Mr. Chips; Blossoms in the Dust; Mrs. Miniver; The Valley of Decision; and, yes, Random Harvest. No, I don’t claim that they’re all artistic masterpieces; that’s something else. These are just movies that have moved me and that I’ve loved since my childhood.
And you know what? They simply don’t make pictures like that anymore. In the year 2000, when Hanging Up came out, its portrait of affectionate relations within a family already made it an anomaly, a throwback, a back number; today, I can’t imagine any Hollywood studio coming close to green-lighting it: quite simply, it’s just too human, too tender, too touching to appeal to the merchants of Marvel comics adaptations and Mission: Impossible retreads; in short, it represents a kind of filmmaking that, in 2025, seems — lamentably — lost in the distant past. If you haven’t seen it, and if it sounds like it might be up your alley, give it a try, if only to pay a fond tribute to the memory of Diane Keaton.
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