標題 Ephron's Usual Dreck
作者 Ernest Hardy
Writer-director Nora Ephron has one of the best
hustles going in Hollywood. Her shamelessly lowbrow,
pandering work not only makes buckets of money but
comes dressed with credentials that will seemingly
always intimidate Hollywood's powerful but insecure
industry drones. Draped in an East Coast pedigree and
with connections to both the political and literary
elite, Ephron has been able to play the part of the
accomplished intellectual while churning out
glossed-up dreck. Ephron only wrote Hanging Up - Diane
Keaton directed - but her imprint is still heavily all
over it.
Georgia (Keaton), Eve (Meg Ryan) and Maddy (Lisa
Kudrow) are sisters struggling with varying degrees of
success in their personal and professional lives. New
York-based Georgia, self-absorbed and living a charmed
life, runs her own self-titled magazine;
accident-prone Eve is a successful party-planner in
Los Angeles; Maddy, the youngest and flightiest
sibling, flits from career to career, never landing
anywhere for long. When the health of their aged
father (Walter Matthau) takes a turn for the worse,
Eve -- the family martyr -- oversees his care while
trying to get her sisters to become more involved.
Many flashbacks, confrontations and happy
reconciliations ensue.
The typical Ephron formula is at work here: jerk a
tear, induce a giggle; repeat. The script flips from
hack sentimentality to sitcom shtick with predictable
rhythms, and though the cast is game, they're hampered
by very weak material. Still, there are glimmers of
what could have been. Ryan's Eve -- when not
shoe-horned into formula -- brings a weighted sadness
to the proceedings; we see her disappointment and
frustration flicker before being snuffed out by the
determination of the script to quickly get to the next
comedic gag. There are also some unnervingly -- and
seemingly unintentional -- creepy bits in the film: a
scene where the three sisters greet their father after
a long absence and he kisses them with a gaping mouth,
as if to swallow them; another scene where the
out-of-it dad comes on to his daughter Eve - even
played for laughs (or maybe because it's played for
laughs) the moment is gross. Matthau's turn as Dad, by
the way, is one of the most crude, unpleasant
variations on the dirty old man in recent memory.
Instead of conveying the charm and lovability that can
co-exist with coldness and selfishness inside a single
being (which is clearly what they were after), Keaton,
Matthau and the screenplay merely shuffle cardboard
characteristics, with the unflattering ones winning
out.
From the very beginning, we feel the film arching hard
toward a happy ending, which undercuts all the drama
and ultimately even short-circuits the dysfunctional
family dynamics that the film claims to explore.
Keaton moves the film briskly, and there's great
chemistry between the actresses (especially Kudrow and
Ryan, who both generate some real laughs), but Hanging
Up eats itself up from the inside. It's hollow, forced
and false.
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