Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

Enjoying Dianne  Wiest last weekend in New York (outstanding in "Forest"), I wanted to rewatch her first Oscar-winning movie performance in the much-lauded “Hannah and Her Sisters” (1986) in which Michael Caine also won his first Oscar, and Woody Allen won one for best screenplay written directly for the screen.

Wiest was, indeed, very good. She has comic scenes dating the typical neurotic Woody Allen character, here named Mickey, In the flashback of the date in which they were fixed up by Hannah (Mia Farrow), who had earlier been married to Mickey, Holly (Wiest) snorts a lot of cocaine and likes rock music. Mickey is appalled by the coke intake and takes her to hear Bobby Short.

Years later, after the hypochondriac tv writer has had a glimpse of mortality and Holly has abandoned an acting career to write, they joke about that date and connect. Holly seems to have found a vocation, dilettante though she had seemed destined to remain. Mickey has lost his (whether it was as a writer or as a hypochondriac) and is really not very convincing as a happy husband second time around in the same family. (Rewatching a production number of the Marx brothers from “Duck Soup” is what pulled out of a suicidal depression about mortality and the Silence of God, btw.)

Meanwhile, Hannah’s current husband, Elliot (Michael Caine) has had an affair with the other sister, Lee (Barbara Hershey with remarkably mousy hair), who has moved on. At the start, she was living with a misanthropic painter played by Max von Sydow (a direct infusion of Ingmar Bergman for Bergman admirer Allen).

In smaller roles, the cast also includes the future Mrs. Allen (a preteen Soon-Yin Previn), Mia Farrow’s mother (Maureen O’Sullivan), Lloyd Nolan, Carrie Fisher, Sam Waterston, J.T. Walsh, and John Turturro.

The movie is novelistic in its large cast of characters and in showing something of a milieu (Manhattan art and entertainment circles). The interconnections are clever/skillful, but movies are not novels, and though this one incorporates the internal monologues of multiple characters, I felt undernourished, wanting to know more about most of the characters. In contrast, I felt that I got to know more about a fairly large and more socially heterogeneous London cast in “My Beautiful Laundrette.” Hanif Kureishi’s screenplay for that Stephen Frears movie would have gotten my vote, had I had one for screenplay awards for 1986 movies. Both movies had happy endings delivered with some irony. “Hannah” was more episodic (a politer term for “diffuse”). I remember more of “Laundrette” (my memories of seeing “Hannah” in its theatrical release were vague and the specifics of what happens in it from watching it again a few hours ago is already fading).

Other than Allen’s scenes of Allen shtick and an intertitles from an e. e. comings poem, the movie is not a comedy. There are some absurdities in the sororial relations and in the Caine/Hershey fling, but most of the movie is not all that far from the Bergmanesque “Interiors” picking at family conflicts. (“Checkhovian”? Not least in the claims to cultural capital, I think it more “Bergmanesque.”)

Carlo Di Palma (who would be director of photography for ten more Allen movies before dying in 2004) shot the film in Farrow’s real New York apartment and other Manhattan locations in soft focus. There is none of the class and racial conflict of Kureishi/Frears London or the New York City I remember from the era and none of the characters has any social or political concerns Von Sydow’s cranky artist rails against a nouveau riche client of Elliott’s looking to decorate a big new house, but no one else even condescends to what television is producing. OK, Mickey takes a shot at the Ice Capades: daring cultural criticism!

Apart from having been bored long, long ago by the typical Woody Allen character as played by Woody Allen, the movie did not seem to require my full attention. Despite the ouststanding acting of an awesome cast, I am rounding a 3.5 rating down because the movie did not absorb me enough to keep me on the couch throughout its running time of 103 minutes,

Allen does not approve of commentary tracks, or, apparently in DVD bonus features of any sort.

©2010, Stephen O. Murray



©2010, Stephen O. Murray

Recommended: No