Hannah and Her Sisters

1986’s “Hannah and Her Sisters”, written and directed by Woody Allen.

Starring Barbara Hershey, Mia Farrow, Dianne Wiest, Michael Caine, Woody Allen, Carrie Fisher, Maureen O’ Sullivan, Lloyd Nolan, Max Von Sydow, and Julie Kavner.

Winner of an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor (Michael Caine), Best Supporting Actress (Dianne Wiest), and Best Original Screenplay (Woody Allen).

Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Director (Woody Allen), Best Art Direction (Stuart Wurtzel, Carol Joffe), and Best Film Editing (Susan E. Morse).

What is it about?

“Hannah” is a New York based drama played out over 3 Thanksgivings. Hannah (Farrow) is the bedrock of her family, a successful actress married to a banker (Caine). Hannah has 2 sisters (Hershey and Wiest), both much less established than her, and she helps them out financially and emotionally. The sisters also have aging parents (Nolan and O’Sullivan), and Farrow has an ex husband (Allen, doing triple duty), a hypochondriac TV producer who is still in the group’s lives.
Complications arise in the group when Caine’s character acts on his feelings for Hershey’s character, an issue since Caine is married to Hannah, Hershey’s sister, and Hershey already has a boyfriend (Sydow). While that drama plays out, Wiest jumps haphazardly from career to career, a recovering addict and free spirit who resents the idea that she needs help. On the peripheral, Allen the hypochondriac, goes through a spiritual crisis, and has some soul searching to do. Will Hannah be able to keep the group from imploding, and will she want to?

 

Why is it worth seeing?

Woody Allen’s mid to late career works have the well laid out themes of the lengths people are willing to go to in order to seek happiness. As in works previous, Allen takes a group of people inside the snow globe of his standard New York setting and shakes it to see what stirs up. The end result is a deftly handled tale of juggling multiple dynamics from flesh and blood characters, with subtlety and realistic arcs that mirror real life. Indeed, the movie avoids the standard character blow ups at the dinner table, and instead focuses on the conversations between people that happen outside of the turkey feast on Thanksgiving.

The cast is wonderful here, with the exception of Allen (see below). Caine and Hershey are subtly great, working through their cognitive dissonance and insecurities, while Wiest pinballs around in her projections and denials, and Farrow is solid as the sister and daughter who seems to have missed the chaotic DNA that the rest of her family carries.

Allen’s technique of having the characters sometimes narrate their thoughts to us is wonderful, a great way to get inside their heads while allowing us to get back out (are you listening Charlie Kaufman?). But whether their internalizing or speaking, the dialogue is fantastic, at times hilariously biting (a line about someone’s addiction to cocaine is particularly good).

On the more challenging side, as I’ve elaborated before, Woody Allen’s screen presence is tough to warm to. While his films are typically enjoyable (with respective hits and misses), I look forwards to a performance of his that isn’t intensely nebbish, or skin crawling (or both). Indeed, “Hannah” features the ultimate scene of Allen’s schtick: Allen arguing with his character’s Jewish parents about converting to Catholicism, a scene that had to have opened up a worm hole in the fabric of heavy handed and cartoonish space-time continuum.
The more Allen films I see, the more I appreciate how much Quentin Tarantino limits himself from being in his own films. Assuming directors should even make cameos, Tarantino would be Allen’s screen time equivalent if he cast himself as Jules or Vincent in “Pulp Fiction”, instead of the blissfully shorter cameos he does (including the welcome sight of blowing himself up in “Django Unchained”). Indeed, Allen’s canon really seemed to open up when he left New York (after all, there are other places out there) and stopped casting himself in roles.
All of this is before we get to Allen’s personal life and dynamics with his actresses, which I’ve spoken about in previous reviews.
 
As well, I’m fascinated by Allen’s depiction of minorities as the hired help. His movies have typically focussed on the neuroses of young and middle aged white urban dwellers who are usually well to do. So watching an African American woman, in a maid’s outfit, neatly and silently tucked into the background of every scene she’s in, is fascinating. Do people of colour exist outside of jazz bars and service industries for Allen?

Finally, “Hannah” is a bit of a slap in the face to religion, as a character has a spiritual crisis, and the resolution of it is fascinating, as it appears to embrace atheism as the end to neurosis. Let’s just say you’ll never look the same way at Wonderbread again.

With all of that said, “Hannah” features some great characters from a wonderful cast (also look for cameos from established stars and oddities of today), dynamic exploration of relationships between people, and realistic resolutions that show what a talent Allen has for prolifically creating dramas that can occasionally make us laugh out loud.

Rating:

4/5

Trailer: Click Here.