I’m not sure if other people do this, but when I read a book, I can’t help but think about who I would choose to play each character should the novel ever be made into a film.  I also visualize how certain shots should be set up and decide which parts of the book I would leave out altogether.  Then if the movie is ever made, I complain about the casting, the script adaptation and the direction.  It always seems better in my head.

The casting for Hanging Up is probably the closest to what I envisioned while reading it.  Need a craggy curmudgeon on his last leg?  Get Walter Matthau.  Need his thirty-something daughter with a cute up-turned nose?  Get Meg Ryan.  Need her hippie younger sister?  Get Lisa Kudrow.  Need her older, sophisticated sister?  Get…okay, I would have picked Sigourney Weaver over Diane Keaton just because she looked good as a blonde in Galaxy Quest.  But since Keaton directed the film, she thought casting herself was a better idea.  Whatever.

The whole dying-father-and-three-daughters set-up might sound a bit like “King Lear,” but don’t be silly.  Ryan (You’ve Got Mail) plays Eve, a stressed-out, married mother of one who owns a party planning company and is the middle daughter of a family that does the majority of their communicating on the phone.  Her father (Matthau, The Odd Couple II), a former Hollywood screenwriter, bombards her with phone calls from his nursing home, while she relays his condition to fashion magazine founder Georgia (Keaton, The Other Sister) and soap opera actress Maddy (Kudrow, Friends).  Over the years, the sisters have taken turns caring for their dad, who has become increasingly crazy as the years pass.

Hanging Up opens with a lovely montage of old photographs of the characters, over which we hear Eve receiving numerous phone calls from her father, bragging about Georgia’s magazine exploits no less.  This helps to establish Eve’s growing irritation with her dad.  So far, so good.  But there are big problems up ahead.

What made the book so interesting is that the characters rarely shared scenes together, emphasizing the importance of the telephone as a major part of the story.  Also, they hung up on each other a lot more, hence the title.  I guess somebody must have thought that nobody would pay to see Meg Ryan talk to people on the phone, so the script was altered to accommodate a minimum of two stars in every scene.

Another reason why the book worked was because it was unconventional.  There aren’t too many comedies about your father dying.  While the novel was full of dry, subtle humor, someone must have decided that the idea of a “comedy” about “death” would be too dark for the public to handle.  So they chose “death” and ran with it.  There are few laughs in the film.

Perhaps the best part of the book was that Eve was slowly beginning to fall in love with an Iranian doctor that was involved in a traffic accident with her son Jesse (Jesse James, A Dog of Flanders).  The doctor and Eve speak on the phone several times, but don’t meet until the end of the novel.  In the film, however, Eve is the one that gets into the accident, so she meets the doctor right away.  There are no phone conversations between them and no romance, implied or otherwise.  Perhaps someone figured that nobody would want to see a Middle Eastern guy and America’s favorite pixie get together.

Want more evidence on why this adaptation doesn’t work?  Eve is supposed to be a protagonist, but her and her sisters are so whiny and self-centered that the dad becomes the most likeable character in the film.  It’s not supposed to be that way.  The freedom with time worked really well in the novel, but it’s done all wrong here.  There is an important flashback that works much better toward the end, but the film shoves it into its middle.

The acting in Hanging Up is pretty solid, so what went wrong?  The book was written by Delia Ephron, who adapted the screenplay with her sister Nora, who also happened to direct Ryan in Mail and Sleepless in Seattle.  It must be difficult to screw your own book up so badly.  The direction is fairly well done, but one has to wonder what issues Keaton has with her parents.  Her last directorial effort, Unstrung Heroes, was about a mom that died.  Toss in a really lame closing scene, and you’ve got one hell of a mess.

1:30 -