Keaton: Hanging Up (2000)

Somewhere around the end of the 90s, feelgood started to collapse as a genre and outlook. One of the most unusual casualties of that moment is Hanging Up, an unsettling fusion of feelgood comedy and harrowing melodrama that revolves around three sisters, played by Diane Keaton, Lisa Kudrow and Meg Ryan, all dealing in different ways with the terminal illness of their father, played by Walter Matthau. Although that’s a veritable canon of feelgood actors, the film is quite dissonantly structured in that, with the exception of several flashbacks, the three sisters and their father don’t come together in person until the very last scene. Up until that point, virtually all their interactions take place over the phone, and don’t even consist of full-blown conversations so much as missed calls, wrong numbers and garbled voicemails. Add to that the fact that the film tends to anchor us in Meg Ryan’s end of the conversation – she’s usually the pivot in whatever four-way miscommunication is taking place – and Diane Keaton and Lisa Kudrow end up dissolving into into the supporting cast, even or especially when we get a rare glimpse of them in person. Of course, Keaton is also there in every scene as director, but the film is effectively a solo vehicle for Ryan, who puts in one of her most frenzied, brittle performances, absorbing the telecommunicative burden of every relationship until it feels as if she’s at the very brink of a psychotic break. Indeed, for great stretches, there’s really nobody in the film but Ryan, as Keaton couches her in a cavernous emptiness that would eventually be erased or at least ameliorated by a more extensive, efficient communication network than she has at her disposal here, but which for now seems to overwhelm her with all the spaces that haven’t been colonised by phone signals, all the interferences that haven’t been smoothed out yet. And it’s quite fascinating to watch Delia and Nora Ephron’s smooth professionalism compete with that, as their screenplay continually searches for a way to reimagine all their standard set-pieces and chord progressions as a one-woman show, collapsing Keaton, Kudrow and finally even Matthau's charisma into Ryan's histrionic monologues.