By Ethan Gough
WKTV Community Contributor
Perhaps for once I should write about a film that most people my age would find interesting… Nah, where would the fun in that be? Why review the latest Disney product masquerading as a real film when I can talk about a family dramedy that’s more than two decades old? So, without further ado, I present to you The Movies That Got Me Through High School.
Hannah and Her Sisters is a film that’s all about relationships. Not just familial relationships, nor romantic relationships like in other Woody Allen films; but also about our relationships with our religion, our past, our emotions, our mortality, and everything else that defines our lives.
Elliot (Michael Caine) is a married financial advisor who’s become infatuated with his wife (Mia Farrow) Hannah’s younger sister, Lee (Barbara Hershey). Lee is currently living with a much older (and much more world-weary) artist named Fredrick, who adores her, but is too cynical about life to provide her with true happiness and fulfillment. The third sister, Holly (Dianne Wiest), is even worse off in her life. She’s a struggling actress who only got off cocaine a year ago, and her dependence on Hannah for both financial and emotional support has caused her to develop resentful feelings towards her. On the side, we have Mickey (Woody Allen) Hannah’s hypochondriac former husband who comes face to face with mortality when his doctor believes the mild hearing loss in his left ear might be a symptom of a brain tumor.
The movie has a lot of fun jumping around to different characters and subplots. It’s much easier to make a movie that’s about everything when the plot is almost none existent. The title cards in between each segment add a novelistic sensibility to the work and make a movie that might come dangerously close to feeling convoluted and pointless into a very cohesive and meaningful work of art.
The screenplay is one of the richest ever written for the silver screen. Every piece of dialogue is as witty and true as it is character-revealing. The style is theatrical in the sense that you can tell the lines being spoken have been written out with great attention, but the actors instill them with so much life and raw emotion that it doesn’t occur to us that most people couldn’t talk like this even if they tried.
The performances in this movie are some of my absolute favorites. They’re the main reason I can’t stop watching the film over and over again. I’m addicted to them. I’m overwhelmed by how passionate and fully realized they are. Michael Cane is enjoyable in every movie he’s in, and Diane Weist is possibly the most adorable woman that has ever lived. The true stand out here however is Barbara Hershey, who is so enchanting that we fall just as helplessly in love with her as Elliot does. We are captivated by her not simply because she’s beautiful, which she most certainly is, but because she’s so real. There is not one scene with Hershey that doesn’t radiate emotional truth and vulnerability. We fall in love with her from the films opening shot and share Elliot’s desire to take care of her forever. Our affection is drawn to her like metal is drawn to a magnet.
If there’s one central theme that I draw from the film it’s that we create most life complications ourselves. Whether we’re constantly going to the doctors to get a diagnosis for a disease we know we must have or are lusting after another person because the one we’re with feels too perfect, most of life’s problems originate (and hopefully resolve) in the mind.
There is another reason I find myself constantly coming back to this movie, it fills me with so much hope. This is apparently not the desired effect of the film, at least, not as far as Allen is concerned. It was his intention to make what he describes in various interviews as, “ a melancholy film.” but somewhere in the film’s conception, he turned it into a more optimistic piece. Personally, I couldn’t be happier to see him fall short of his original intentions. I like to walk away from a film feeling depressed as much as the next art-film fanatic, but too much of that can be draining. It’s a great pleasure to watch a movie that reminds me that we decide whether our lives are going to be happy and full of meaning or, sorrowful and unsatisfying.
Ethan Gough is an Independent filmmaker and film critic pursuing his passion for cinema at Motion Picture Institute in Troy, Michigan this fall. He received the award for Best Live Action Short at the 2020 Kent County Teen Film Festival for his film Summer Days. He had two films in the 2022 Kent County Teen Film Festival, Bros Night and Alone. Ethan also written from Reel Rundown and Hub Pages.
