Hannah and Her Sisters

A film review by Christopher Null - Copyright 2001

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It's not his best, but Hannah and Her Sisters is definitely Woody Allen's second best. The film does
everything a Woody film should -- it deals with complex issues in a hilarious way. Up this time, as the
title suggests, is the notion of family, as Allen skewers a dysfunctional clan led by three sisters (Mia
Farrow, Dianne Wiest, and Barbara Hershey) and the rotten men the come in and out of their lives.
Allen plays his neurotic self to perfection, this time a hypochondriac TV executive and ex-husband of
Hannah (Farrow). Michael Caine, though, steals the show as Hannah's current husband who falls in
love with sister Lee (Hershey), herself living with an aging, pedantic shut-in (Max von Sydow).
The acting is sublime, but the little touches push Hannah to greatness. Allen's photographic
compositions are among his best ever here, spying on Caine as he makes eyes at Hershey from afar
while we play along with the game. His musical selections, always impeccable, are fantastic here, with
Harry James' trumpet music belting out the emotion.
An unequivocal classic (and winner of three Oscars -- for Wiest, Caine, and Allen's screenplay) that
any Allen fan must own. Or anyone with a family, for that matter.
Part of The Woody Allen Collection, Set 3.
Hannah & Her Sisters
1 9 8 6 (USA)
Constructed in short chapters, with a rainbow spectrum of characters taking
turns as narrators, Hannah and Her Sisters paints a picture of contemporary
New York life, exposing sadness and joy and the ritual of self-discovery in
every brushstroke.
The plot spreads over three Thanksgivings at the spacious Central Park West
apartment of Hannah (Farrow), with she and her sisters Lee (Hershey) and
Holly (Wiest) as the centrepieces.
The children of Bohemian show-biz parents who spar endlessly and endure
their children's crises superficially, the girls are rivals, friends, and catalysts,

and in two years of their lives we encounter a smorgasbord of survival

techniques that could not happen anywhere else but a planet unto itself like
the island of Manhattan.
Hannah is an actress who would give it up in a second to have babies. She's
divorced from Mickey (Woody Allen), has had twins by artificial insemination
from his ex-writing partner and is now married to Elliot (Michael Caine in his
Oscar-winning Best Supporting Actor role), a successful financial adviser with
keen business acumen but not much substance.
Elliot loves Hannah's cool, controlled (and slightly flaky) domestic grip on
reality, but he lusts after her beautiful, erotic, unfocused sister, Lee (who lives
with a brooding, depressed, cynical painter (Von Sydow) who is always
threatening to kill himself).
But the queen of neurosis is Holly - A cocaine sniffing, chain-smoking,
anxiety-ridden dilettante who is into ESP, punk rock, and drugs and has failed
at everything. Since Holly can't get an acting job, she opens the Stanislavski
Catering Service with her pushy, competitive girlfriend April (Fisher). Dianne
Wiest won the 1986 Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Holly.
Hannah holds everything together with a maternal perfection that infuriates
everyone. Her self-assurance is unnerving, especially to her ex-husband
Mickey, who is an ulcer-ridden hypochondriac who wafts through the streets
of New York between Saturday Night Live and various hospital testing labs
(he is convinced he's dying). Mickey also tries everything - He even converts
from Judaism to Catholicism.
He is actually so depressed that he would like to kill himself . . . but his
parents would be so devastated that he "would have to kill them first to spare
them the humiliation".
Hannah is a valentine or love letter from Woody Allen to the whole neurotic
world - A painfully accurate and richly comic masterpiece, which is probably
Woody's most complex yet most accessible film (No wonder critics treated it
like the second coming).
TRIVIA NOTE
Hannah's apartment was really Mia Farrow's own on Central Park West, NY,
while some of the children in her Mother Goose nursery are her own children
(natural, adopted, and surrogate). Her mother in the film, a once-beautiful
actress still charged with vitality and charm, is played by Maureen O'Sullivan
- Mia's real-life mother.

Customer Reviews
Average Rating:

A Fantastic Woody Allen Film

This is my fourth favorite Woody film. It is very dramatic and funny. I recommend it to anyone who likes
romantic comedies or Woody Allen.

Among the top five Allen films. Buy it!

`Hannah and Her Sisters' by writer/director Woody Allen is certainly among the top five of Allen's best films,
along with `Annie Hall', `Crimes and Misdemeanors', `Manhattan', and `Take the Money and Run'. It is
certainly one of my favorites, although I think it is just a bit less tight than the later `Crimes and Misdemeanors'
with which it shares a lot of themes and a similarly enormous cast of familiar faces.
One of the most important similarities between the two movies is that there are two parallel, but connected plots
and Allen's character is central to the lesser of the two plots, given as much to provide comic relief as to move
the story onward. Also in both movies, Allen plays an only modestly successful entertainment business creative
player who is not incompetent, but who is not doing well. Both `Hannah...' and `Crimes...' give Allen's character
a major love interest and I am very pleased with the fact that `Hannah...' ends with a happy resolution to all the
movie's issues. One can be certain that new crises will arise for these characters the day after the final scene, but
at least for us, they are all in a good place. That sentence has unwittingly shown an important fact about this
movie. We care for these characters. We may not be too concerned about the fate of Carrie Fisher, Max Von
Sydow, Tony Roberts, Daniel Stern, Maureen O'Sullivan, Lloyd Nolan, or John Turturro who appear on the
screen for just a few minutes. But, we really develop a strong interest in the fates of the characters played by
Allen, Michael Caine, Mia Farrow, Barbara Hershey and Dianne Wiest. While Allen is simply playing his usual
nebbish, I cannot for the life of me see how the Academy Awards singled out Wiest from the performances of
Caine and Farrow, which I think are equally strong.
Like all of Allen's movies since `Manhattan', the jokes are much better integrated into the story and they are
much less predictable than the sight gag of Allen's pistol carved from a bar of soap turning into a handful of
suds in the rain in `Take the Money and Run'. This makes them both more fun and droller, as when the very
serious Max Von Sydow says he does not sell his paintings by the yard. Allen also continues to use wordless
visual gags as when he empties a sack of Catholic religious items, finishing up with a loaf of Wonder bread and
Hellman's mayonnaise.
New York City plays almost as big a part in this movie as it does in `Manhattan', with the gimmick of an
architect's showing off his favorite buildings as a way of giving us a tour of some of Manhattan's more
attractive sights. Even the gritty Greenwich Village streets give up some of their charm as Caine chases down
Barbara Hershey in order to bump into her with a rationale for her to show him to a nearby used book shop.
We can also add this to the list of the many Allen movies where one or more characters, especially Allen's
character, end up in a theatre watching a classic film. In this case, it's the Marx brothers in `Duck Soup',
arguably one of their funniest.
If you are not a rabid Woody Allen fan, I would recommend this movie above almost all others for purchase.
Like all his films, there are virtually no special features, but the movie is longer than average and has one of his
very best stories and very best collection of characters.

Woody's Chekhovian Film Expertly Melds Multiple Characters

When Woody Allen has a comic moment of religion-fueled panic with a hair-trigger rifle, I was thinking of the
famous Chekhov dictum: "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or
third chapter it absolutely must go off." In fact, Allen's emotionally robust, multi-dimensional 1986 film has a

pervasive Chekhovian sense that I'm sure is quite intentional, though the plot doesn't remotely resemble that of
"The Three Sisters", nor does it repeat the Bergmanesque gloom of Allen's own "Interiors" (also about three
sisters). Rather, this film covers two years in the lives of a large cast of characters focused primarily on three
sisters, all part of the New Yorker intelligentsia, whether real or aspiring, who live in the trendier Manhattan
neighborhoods. Family Thanksgiving dinners frame the story effectively, and a dinner in the middle of the film
acts as a turning point for several lives. It's a predictable structure but beautifully executed.
The sisters, of course, are completely different in character and temperament. Family gatekeeper Hannah is
married to Elliot, a business manager in the entertainment industry. Tiring of her self-reliance, he falls in love
with her sister Lee, the free-spirited beauty living in an expansive SoHo loft with Frederick, a bitter and
emotionally co-dependent artist. Hannah herself used to be married to Mickey, a successful comedy TV
producer and a hypochondriac who goes through a crisis in faith once he frees himself of a fictitious, selfdiagnosed brain tumor. But through a chance second meeting long after a very bad first date, Mickey gets
reacquainted with Holly, the third sister, an insecure, self-conscious actress-turned-caterer-turned writer and a
recovering cocaine addict. Add to this unwieldy mix the sisters' parents, a pair of ham-fisted show business
veterans dealing with years of alcoholism, adultery and verbal abuse. How these seemingly disparate characters
interact yields the true beauty of this film, thanks to Allen's unmistakable technique as a New York-loving
filmmaker and his sharply drawn script, which alternates easily between funny and poignant. Seeing this film
nearly twenty years later lends even more interesting insight, as one can see how Allen must have viewed Mia
Farrow at the time as Hannah, the nurturer of an extended brood, the "perfect" wife and mother, always there to
comfort those in her orbit, even though her insistent good will could be a source of resentment for those she
helps. Allen explored these alienating traits to even more virulent results in his final film with Farrow, 1992's
"Husbands and Wives".
Never that intriguing an actress otherwise (though Allen seems to bring out her depth), Farrow makes Hannah
credible not only in her inherited role as the family's Rock of Gibraltar but also in her dawning self-awareness.
Michael Caine is terrific as Elliott, a comical manipulator masquerading as a romantic, and Barbara Hershey
effortlessly portrays Lee as the conflicted earth mother/sex symbol figure her character demands her to be.
Allen plays Mickey as, of course, Allen, but with an increasing romanticism as he becomes drawn to Holly.
With such keen competition, the cast standout is Dianne Wiest as Holly in an adventuresome performance as a
character you hate one minute and like the next all in line with her barely tolerable erratic nature. Smaller roles
are filled expertly by Max Von Sydow perfectly convincing with his stentorian righteousness as Frederick;
Carrie Fisher as Holly's insidiously competitive girlfriend; Sam Waterson as an available, self-important
architect; and as the parents, Lloyd Nolan and a rather over-the-top Maureen O'Sullivan (Farrow's real mother).
You can even see Farrow's adopted daughter and Allen's future wife, Soon-Yi Previn, briefly as one of the
children at Thanksgiving.
It's a true family affair and an emotionally satisfying one with layers of complexity presented in subtle episodes
that feel truthful. The best example is the lunch table roundelay with the camera circling mercilessly around a
self-absorbed Holly, an ignorantly defensive Hannah and a guilt-stricken Lee, as their sisterly bonding seem to
disconnect and deconstruct before our very eyes. It's a masterful scene. Even Holly's veiled attempts to connect
with Mickey toward the end feel authentic and sweetly romantic, especially as one gets the sense that these two
oddballs have inadvertently found their soul-mates. While it is not as romantically intimate as "Annie Hall" or
as viscerally incisive as "Manhattan", "Hannah and Her Sisters" is Allen's most accomplished film, especially in
the breadth of characters experiencing their own dramatic, intersecting arcs, and it is sadly the last Allen film I
have enjoyed without condition