# Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

### reviewed by
Long Che Chan

    Hannah and Her Sisters
    directed by Woody Allen
    starring Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey, Dianne Wiest, Michael Caine, Woody
    Allen, Max Von Sydow
    USA, 1986
    Rated PG-13 for adult themes

I don't know why I like Woody Allen's films so much. He, like myself, admires Ingmar Bergman's films and his movies have a sort of wonderful way of making you feel giddy. Most of them are funny. Hannah and Her Sisters has its big laughs, but its primary purpose isn't to get giggles out of you, but to elaborate on a moral that is told, loosely or obviously, in most every Allen movie I've seen- life will fall into place, the outsider will one day be an insider. There is a Tolstoy quotation mentioned in the film in which the author states that "life is meaningless." It seems to me that this movie is trying to prove Tolstoy wrong.

Perhaps Allen was aspiring to more Bergmanesque heights when he adopted three sisters as his main characters for this film. Hannah and Her Sisters is a skillful and fun study of these three women and their relationships with each other, their parents, and the men in their life. These three sisters belong to a successful show business clan and Allen uses their annual Thanksgiving dinners as the link between each other. It's a very hopeful and perky movie, beginning and ending with Thanksgiving dinners, each marking significant turning points in the characters' lives.

The sisters are a suffering bunch- not as miserable and sullen as the threesome in Cries and Whispers, but very much weary of life, people, and sometimes, of each other. Hannah (Mia Farrow) is the "head" sister, the woman "in control" of her life, who is generous, understanding, and nearly perfect. However, she is so full of her charity, she forgets herself. She says she has needs, but one of the film's minor flaws is that she never expresses them. Throughout the movie she is a tame earth-mother who never seems to needs anything. Lee (Barbara Hershey) is a vibrant, young woman who is trapped in a cage constructed by her and her also-caged boyfriend (Max von Sydow), a pitiful man who "teaches" her about art, mocking people's enjoyment of pop culture. She just so happens to share romantic feelings for Hannah's second husband Elliot (Michael Caine), a sweet, confused financial-consultant. The third sister is Holly (Dianne Wiest), a mess of a lady who has a terrible cocaine addiction, an impotent career as an actress, and no one who loves her. Within the span of two years their lives will change, will weave in and out, go from turmoil to bliss.

Woody Allen has a character, a neurotic hypochondriac named Mickey Sachs, the ex-husband of Hannah. I think he's the most important character in the film- he is the one who, in the end, realizes life is not meaningless, that it's a ride, and it is on this note the film ends. Maybe surrounding the whole movie around himself was a scheme of vanity on Woody Allen's part, but the movie wouldn't work without his hilarious and ridiculous cynicism and, later, his change of heart. Mickey Sachs is the outsider of the family, an outsider trying to belong somewhere, and in the end, he finds his way into the clan. This is a man who is like all of Allen's other characters he has written for himself, an erratic shrimp drowning in his own neurosis, a man trying to find the meaning of life. Throughout the beginning of Hannah, Mickey obsessively worries over a possible brain tumor causing his ear infection. He wakes up in the middle of the night screaming like a lunatic. When he discovers he is out of danger's way, he concludes that life is meaningless and goes on a quest for a religious belief to brighten up his existence. Woody Allen never strays from his usual topics- religion, art, death, life, love- and here, he seems to have come to a point where he has found the answer- there is no answer. Life's meaning is that there is no meaning. We are here for the ride and those who are ceaselessly plagued by pointless matters like death are squandering their time on Earth.

The decisive point of the movie for the sisters, as a group, (spoilers ahead) is a scene in a restaurant- Holly has been disappointed yet again with an audition failure and is, once again, asking for Hannah's money so she can pursue writing; Lee has had her fling with Elliot and it's getting much too complicated for her; and Hannah is exasperated with Holly's unsettling insecurity. As the camera circles endlessly around the table, a wellspring of emotion pours out of the actors and begins to finalize their characters' suffering, or at least make it evident to each other.

The definitive point for Mickey Sachs is (more spoilers) a screening of the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup and as the lunacy of the movie begins to engage Mickey, he realizes, finally, what he has been searching for.

The whole plot is tied up very nicely at the end. The way the movie is structured is wonderfully different from any other previous Allen film- each new chapter of the movie is introduced with a title card showing a quotation (like the Tolstoy one), or a character's current thoughts. It is a brilliant style that doesn't draw attention to itself, unlike the remarkably ingenious construction of Annie Hall did. The movie is very light and fluid and thoroughly enjoyable because it's smart. By the way, it was also made the year I was born, and I hate the fact that the Academy's Best Picture award that year went to Platoon, a bloody war film, instead of a feel-good comedy-drama like this. The script is less of a dissection and more of a contemplation. I don't think it's Allen's best (Annie Hall holds a dear place in my heart), but it's certainly his most complete.

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