Hanging Up

Hanging Up is a 2000 American comedy-drama film about a trio of sisters bonding over their curmudgeonly father with whom none of them were close. It was directed by Diane Keaton, and stars Keaton, Meg Ryan, Lisa Kudrow, and Walter Matthau, in his final film role. The film is based on Delia Ephron's 1995 novel of the same name. It was released on February 18, 2000 and received negative reviews from critics. Plot Georgia Mozell, Eve Marks and Maddy Mozell are adult sisters. Self-obsessed Georgia (Keaton) is the editor of her own wildly successful self-titled women's magazine. Maddy (Kudrow) is a vacuous soap opera actress who has always struggled for her own identity. Party planner Eve (Ryan) struggles to balance her family life with her career while also caring for their father. All three sisters are still wounded by their parents' divorce, after many years of acrimony, which resulted in their mother Pat (Leachman) essentially abandoning them all. Despite being as busy with her own life as the others, Eve is the only one of the three who deals with the long term hospitalization of their cantankerous seventy-nine-year-old father, Lou Mozell (Matthau), when he enters the early stages of dementia and has to be hospitalized. Lou has a history of alcoholism and womanizing, and despite a hurtful incident years earlier, Eve takes charge of her father's care. In addition to answering his frequent, often incoherent phone calls, she visits him in the hospital nearly every day. Maddy occasionally visits as well, but also saddles Eve with the care of her large dog, Buck. Flashbacks show Eve, Maddy and Georgia visiting Lou one Christmas after he attempted suicide after Pat left him. Eve confronts her mother, who admits she only had children because she believed that was what was normal, but discovered it wasn't actually what she wanted out of life. She goes back to her father and they go Christmas tree shopping together. Lou's joyful nature helps Eve to forget the pain of her mother's rejection.