Airing Dirty Laundry

Sisters, sisters, there were never such devoted sisters…

The Ephron girls were told all their lives that everything is copy. Everything that seemed like a tragedy could be turned into a triumph in which the victim becomes the hero. They were to take notes in case something could be turned into the written word later.

As life happened, this idea of everything being copy wasn’t always so much a way of generating ideas as it was catharsis, such as in the case of Delia Ephron’s 1995 novel, Hanging Up, and its 2000 film adaptation of the same name. Based on the real-life death of her dad, Henry Ephron, it was Delia’s way of dealing with the drama surrounding his passing.

Hanging Up opens with Eve Mozell (Meg Ryan) checking her dad, Lou (Walter Matthau) into an assisted living facility because he’s got dementia and often doesn’t recognize his three daughters. Mozell matriarch Pat (Cloris Leachman) left the family years ago and moved to Colorado, and since then the family has disintigrated. It falls to Eve to install Lou in his room and hang his favorite John Wayne poster and set the family photo taken with Duke on the nightstand.

The three Mozell ladies mostly interact by phone. Eve, the middle daughter, is married to Joe (Alan Arkin) and has a son, Jesse (Jesse James), the latter of whom takes great pride in being able to laugh like Pee Wee Herman. Youngest daughter, Maddy (Lisa Kudrow) is an actress whose best friend is her gigantic St. Bernard. Oldest sister, Georgia (Diane Keaton) is the editor of her own magazine, Georgia, extremely self-absorbed, lives in New York, and allegedly stole Eve’s stuffing recipe to give to the New York Times. 

These three sisters are soon destined to meet again, as Eve is planning an anniversary banquet at the Nixon Library for Georgia’s magazine, so the phones will soon be excess baggage. In the meantime, Eve is firmly a member of what author Lisa Sampson called Club Sandwich, because she’s not only raising a family but caring for a dying parent.

Oh, and she also bashes into a Mercedes belonging to a kindly doctor named Omar Kunundar (Shaun Duke) and later meets his mother, Ogmed (Ann Bortolotti) who becomes a shoulder to cry on, at least temporarily.

Other than that, Eve brings Lou takeout, and sometimes she, Lou, and Maddy watch Maddy’s soap while eating Chinese food or pizza. There’s also the matter of selling the house and reminding Lou he doesn’t live there anymore. In the meantime, Eve finds herself remembering past moments with Dad; some are awkward, some are heartwarming, and others are infuriating.

When Georgia, Eve, and Maddy meet again, they’ll have a few things to say to each other, and they’ll find out how quickly they can go from laughter to tears.

Hanging Up seems pretty low-key. It drags. There’s no real fun anywhere and not nearly as much banter or wit as there is in You’ve Got Mail or Sleepless In Seattle; likely because of the serious and personal subject matter. While it’s very much in ernest, it also seems like it’s trying too hard to be what we expect to see in an Ephron movie.

It’s also really hard to like any of these characters, maybe because they talk on the phone so much and they’re constantly sniping. It feels as if the audience is being held at arm’s length for most of the movie. No one starts being real until the last third or so. To be honest, Omar and his mother are the sanest people in the cast, but their appearance is so minimal it’s almost needless. They serve to give Eve a break from her family troubles and that’s all.

Not surprisingly, the movie has a twelve percent critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a thirty-nine percent audience score. And yes, I realize Rotten Tomatoes is by no means an accurate aggregator of critic or audience reaction, but in this case it seems pretty legit.

The original novel didn’t garner high praise from all corners, either. Kirkus Reviews said, “When time comes for an emotional payoff, Ephron delivers an absurd and punch-line-dependent deathbed scene straight out of the land of sitcom. A steady dose of low-grade humor helps, but ultimately this portrait of a dysfunctional family cum telephone circle is only modestly affecting.”

Not only that, but the reason the movie doesn’t quite land likely stems from the real life conflict between Delia and Nora, who co-wrote the screenplay. “I didn’t want her changing my material,” Delia told nephew Jacob Bernstein in the 2016 documentary, Everything Is Copy.

She went on:

“My father had died, and Nora wasn’t shooting, I think, Sleepless, and the problems of his death really were Amy’s and mine. Nora wasn’t there…I had resentment for that. So when we started to work on Hanging Up, I was upset about that, and she was trying to make it hers. I’m sure she thinks I was mean about it, I thought she was mean about it, and we made up, but it was horrible, actually, for each of us…We’d been together our whole lives and then we weren’t speaking over a piece of material. In retrospect, how stupid is that?”

In a few respects, though, Delia protected Nora and the Ephron family, as in her novel Georgia goes to Lou’s funeral, but in real life, Nora skipped Henry’s. Also, both Henry and his wife, Phoebe had been alcoholics, although they never divorced as Pat and Lou did. Everything might have been copy, but not everything was fair game.

For more of the Ephron family, please see posts from all our great bloggers here. Thanks for reading, all, and I hope to see you on Saturday for this month’s Shamedown…

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Hanging Up is available on DVD from Amazon, as well as Delia Ephron’s original novel.

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Bibliography

Everything Is Copy. Directed by Jacob Bernstein and Nick Hooper. Performances by Tom Hanks, Rita Wilson, Steven Spielberg, Meg Ryan, Reese Witherspoon, Meryl Streep, Kate Capshaw, Gaby Hoffman, Rob Reiner, etc. HBO Documentary Films, 2016.