Hanging Up

When you see trailers for a film starring Meg Ryan, Lisa Kudrow, and Diane Keaton, running around all leggy, blonde, and well-groomed while "We Are Family" plays on the soundtrack, you can hardly resist making that sound usually reserved for new puppies: "Awww, aren't they cute!" Even with ultra-codger Walter Matthau in tow, whose rubbery face is craggy enough that he's starting to look cute too, their new movie was bound to have people lining up as if to peer through the big plate-glass window in a maternity ward: "Look, Meg's grinning at me!" "Isn't Walter precious, with that drool on his chin?"

And as the opening credits roll over a montage of old, youthful photos of the cast, those sentiments seem fairly appropriate. But it soon becomes apparent that Hanging Up is going to do things a lot more serious than just make jokes about the unsettling influence of telephones (although it will do plenty of that; in fact, by the time it was over I was ready to dig up Alexander Graham Bell for a DNA sample just so I could personally enjoy strangling his clone).

Ryan plays Eve, a harried L. A. mom* and entrepreneur whose latest challenge -- she's already dealing with her son's newly affected Pee Wee Herman laugh, while trying to arrange a businesswomen's lunch for 500 at the Nixon library -- is coping with her father's (Matthau) failing health (he's beginning to look, and act, a bit like Nixon himself: senile, manipulative, and downright mean). She's stuck with his upkeep because their mother (Cloris Leachman) is permanently estranged (perhaps wisely), and sister Georgia (Keaton), who's as obsessively successful as third sib, soap actress Maddy (Kudrow), is compulsively flighty, spends all her time in New York running the magazine named after her. As Dad's condition worsens, though, they're either going to have to set differences and history aside, or risk solidifying a rift that could separate them permanently.

Directed by Keaton, scripted by another set of creative sisters, Nora and Delia Ephron (You've Got Mail), from Delia's novel, Hanging Up does balance the serious stuff with a lot of modern-problems humor, but is still a darker movie than anyone likely expected. That's okay though, since that duality helps keep the pace from bogging hopelessly when one of the flashback sequences runs on so long it starts to look like somebody stuck another movie in the middle. The sisters inflict upon each other the kind of lovingly hateful conversation that everyone's family has unsheathed, or will eventually, under similar pressure (at least, if your family is really cute), so it's cathartic in a light-hearted way that picking out cemetery plots isn't. B

*Eve isn't too busy to find time somewhere to maintain what is undoubtedly one of the most carefully messed-up hairdos since Johnny Depp mixed Prell with black shoe polish for Edward Scissorhands. Every strand appears to have been painstakingly cut to a different length, and the part looks like a furrow plowed by a drunken farmer..

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