Family Hang Ups
Delia Ephron, Nora Ephron, Diane Keaton, and a talented cast make "Hanging Up" a true family affair.

Three daughters and their relationships with their father may sound like the makings of a tragedy on the order of Shakespeare's King Lear. But unlike that classic tale of power, woe, and love, Columbia Pictures' Hanging Up offers a contemporary, touching, real world story with characters and situations that anyone who's ever been a member of a family can relate to. Instead of king-sized struggles over power, ambition and loyalty, it's about the way that each of us fills a role within a family, and how events can cause us to rethink and change those roles.

In Hanging Up, three close sisters: Georgia (Diane Keaton), Eve (Meg Ryan), and Maddy (Lisa Kudrow) keep in touch, mainly by phone, and carry on the typical in-fighting, conflicts, and sharing that are a part of every family. The event that changes their lives and their relationships is the final illness and death of their father, played by Walter Matthau.

The plot is based on Delia Ephron's first novel, "Hanging Up," which was published in 1995. "I used my relationship with my father as the core of the book," says Ephron. "And, I wanted to write about being the middle child and what a nightmare it is to feel constantly like you have to make everybody happy." The book's plot is fictional. In real life, Ephron is one of four sisters - not three, as depicted in the book - and her parents remained married. "I just tried to capture an emotional truth about my relationship with my father," adds Ephron.

When Ephron's father became ill, she was the only sister who lived in the Los Angeles area, near her father, and had to continually phone her sisters to let them know how he was doing. Also, as in the movie, Ephron found herself constantly on the phone speaking with her father. "He would call at any hour of the day or night," says Ephron. "So there was never going to be a book about my father without it being a book about the telephone." According to Ephron, her father forgot nearly everything except her phone number, and could call her until the last day of his life.

Delia Ephron collaborated with her sister, Nora Ephron to write the movie's screenplay. "We have the same references and the same history," says Delia Ephron. "This project was interesting because it was partially about our family, and we saw the family slightly differently."

"I thought that Delia was writing about something important," says Nora Ephron. "Which is what happens when confronting your own mortality, and your parents get sick." Nora Ephron feels that movies can be personal, but without being autobiographical. "This didn't feel like my life, but there was enough," says Nora Ephron. "Delia says that every child in our family has different parents, and this is very much her parents, and not my parents."

Many in the audience will relate to the trials of caring for an elderly parent, and they will undoubtedly empathize with elements in each of the sisters' characters. Keaton's character is the eldest sister, the successful editor-in-chief of her own major national magazine. In the movie, Keaton's character largely ignores her father's illness, and stays immersed in her work - or perhaps she is unable to think that far beyond herself. Georgia is the type of person who keeps her nose to the grindstone, using her work as an excuse to avoid dealing with things she'd rather not face, which keeps her apart from both her terminally ill father and her younger sisters.

"Because I'm the oldest of three sisters, it was too close for comfort for me," says Diane Keaton, who also directed the film. "But I loved the script because it was really funny and touching and insightful about family. It was not only funny, but it also dealt with some very deep, underlying issues about family."

"You take your family for granted," says Keaton. "You think you can get away with anything, that they have to stick with you because you're family." According to Keaton, it's easy to deny that one's place in the family can change, that everyone, no matter how old or how accomplished, tends to return to the family roles they filled when they were ten years old. "I think Eve," says Keaton, "is the one who breaks through the most."

According to Keaton, there is something about having a shared history with other family members. "Who else can you talk to about your father?" asks Keaton. "There is nobody that you can talk to, that means as much to you, who shares the kind of humor that you share, like members of your family."

Ryan's character, Eve, the middle daughter, runs her own party-planning business, juggling her work, house, husband, son, and dying father, which leaves her little time for herself. The most nurturing of the sisters, Eve becomes stretched to almost the breaking point. She is also the closest to her father, despite the fact that they have had a rocky relationship through the years.

"Eve is the steady one, the most grounded of the sisters," says Nora Ephron. "She's not quite as ambitious as the other two are, and she's the one who gets stuck with the caretaking. I think there is always one sibling who gets the lion's share of the caretaking, and Eve is that one."

"She loves her father so much, when he gave her so little," says Keaton. "Her capacity to love is so much greater than anyone else in the family. And she knows that she's not the favorite one." Meg Ryan loves the relationship that her character Eve has with her dad. "Here's a guy that's so unpredictable-he's an alcoholic with a big heart, and you never know what to expect," says Ryan. "By the end of the movie, she comes up and says yes, it was put upon me, but I brought it on myself."

According to Ryan, her character Eve resents the responsibility, but at the same time, feels special because others come to depend on her. "She dives into everybody's problems and makes them her own," says Ryan. "It's a difficult to way to live, and she has rampant empathy."

"The middle sister, the sister everyone depends on, actually feels morally righteous about having that role," says Delia Ephron. "You act like, 'how did this ever happen to me?' but secretly you believe you're the most sensitive person in the family."

"Eve is very interesting to me," says Meg Ryan, "because her situation is very much the modern woman's dilemma." According to Ryan, many women today are doing too much, because they are being told that they can and should do everything. "Eve's generosity is also her greatest liability," says Ryan. "It's an obstacle, and she's over-extended and underappreciated."

"First, women had no choices," says Ryan. "Now we have so many. How can we manage all those choices without feeling badly when rejecting some of them. We can't keep going so overwhelmed and responsible for so many people?"

"This is the story of a woman finding her place in her family," adds Ryan. "And understanding that in order for her to grow up and move on in life, she has to deal with some of the issues in her past."

Kudrow's character, Maddy, the youngest daughter, is the baby of the family. She works as an actress in a soap opera, wants to be taken seriously by everyone else in the family, but relies on Eve more than she realizes. "Maddy wants to think of herself as very successful and independent and on her own." says Lisa Kudrow. "In reality, she's a near miss - the baby of the family - and all she wants is to be the star of the family, like Georgia." As for Maddy's relationship with Eve,

Kudrow says, "It is more like that of a child and parent. "[Maddy] takes Eve for granted, knowing that Eve will always be there to pick up the mess. In a way, her family brings out the baby in her."
Matthau's character, the dying father Lou, "is insane, demented, but he also has a brilliant mind," says Keaton. "His observations are wacky, and even though he's destroying everything around him, he's one of those people that you can't help but fall in love with and respect in a weird way."

As in all families, good communications are important in this film. "It's essentially a story about communication and the value of and need for it in your family." says Ryan. The telephone is at the center of the film. "The telephone in this movie," says Bill Robinson, Executive Producer, "is actually an instrument of torture, and the cord is like the umbilical cord. It's what connects us to our families nowadays."

"Life in this family is talk, talk, talk," says Keaton. "They're very bright, they're smart, and what's so endearing about them is that they do really love each other very much, and in their own wacky way they're very dependent on one another.

The phone takes on even larger significance for Delia Ephron. "In families," Ephron explains, "the phone is our connection to the world and, once you grow up, to your parents. And when you have a crazy parent, at some point you have to learn to disconnect from their craziness, which is what Eve has to learn. The phone becomes the metaphor for both being connected and for disconnecting, for hanging up"

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