By Jay Boyar(奧蘭多哨兵報專業影評家)
文章來源:Orlando Sentinel報紙(就是板豬我去美國時看的報紙)
Published: 02/18/00
Every time the phone rings, Eve (Meg Ryan) feels her
heart jump.
That's because her father (Walter Matthau) is dying.
Each call could be the one that tells her that he's
gone.
Eve's relationship with her father is at the center of
Hanging Up, a frazzled, fitfully comic weepie that
fritters away a potentially powerful theme.
Everyone with aged parents knows what this film is
driving at. But Hanging Up loses its way in detours,
dead ends and car crashes.
That last point, by the way, isn't just a metaphor.
While visiting her father at the hospital, Eve
actually does slam her car into another car in the
parking garage.
In addition, she must care for a big, sloppy,
Lyme-disease-ridden dog that belongs to her ditsy
soap-opera-actress sister, Maddy (Lisa Kudrow). Plus,
she must organize a gala party at the Nixon Library
and convince her other sister, publishing-hotshot
Georgia (Diane Keaton), to give a speech at it.
I'm guessing that the idea, here, was to show how a
family tragedy will affect every aspect of a busy
person's life. But the way things work out, all of
these incidents and subplots seem like distractions
and diversions.
When Eve does slow down long enough to focus on her
father, the relationship degenerates into cliches: Eve
is the one who cares for him, but all he wants to talk
about is the glamorous Georgia -- or John Wayne.
Oh, didn't I mention that Daddy was once a
screenwriter who knew the Duke personally? Yup, that's
another distraction.
Based on the 1995 novel by Delia Ephron, Hanging Up
was written by Ephron and her sister Nora Ephron
(You've Got Mail). Not only does Diane Keaton play
Georgia, she also directed this film, her first
attempt at directing since Unstrung Heroes.
That little-seen 1995 film also concerned a dying
parent. But it was a strong, original, emotionally
subtle movie.
Hanging Up, which opens today, is everything that
Unstrung Heroes was not.
To be fair, I should mention that there is a certain
amount of free-floating wit in this movie, mostly
courtesy of Matthau, who is amusingly wry. He seems to
be having fun with his role, especially when he talks
about John Wayne's private parts or about a woman he
claims to have known whose last name was Moo Goo Gai
Pan.
As Eve, Ryan never gets a handle on her role, which
turns into a marathon of dithering. Keaton, meanwhile,
plays Georgia as a stock celebrity. And Kudrow glides
along by turning Maddy into a version of her Friends
character.
By the end, it turns out that Hanging Up isn't only a
movie about a woman and her dying father. It's also a
movie about a woman and her two self-involved sisters.
This comes as something of a surprise, considering how
superficially director Keaton and the Ephrons have
dealt with this sub-theme.
In any case, the final scene shows the sisters
laughing together, preparing a Thanksgiving feast and
playfully throwing flour at each other. I felt like
throwing something too, but I didn't have any
tomatoes.
--
※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.twbbs.org)
◆ From: 140.112.92.133