Three Women and a Dad

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Hanging Up has the perky pace and the arch attitudes of a comedy. Everyone looks as if he or she is about to deliver a funny line. It's only after 20 expectant minutes or so that you realize you haven't laughed yet. And that the hope for humor--as opposed to frazzle, which soon gives way to frenzy--is growing dimmer.

Adapted by Delia and Nora Ephron from the former's novel, which drew from their lives, the film is scarcely a tragedy. But it is a meditation on the inconvenience of mortality, about the way a parent's final illness can intrude on his children at the worst possible moment, about how the business of conducting him out of this life with some dignity has to be improvised amid all the distractions of the day: the fender bender, the shrilling of the cell phone, the dog eager to gnaw that phone into silence.

The parent here is a difficult case. A onetime screenwriter named Leo Mozell whom Walter Matthau plays with unforgiving ferocity, he was a monster of self-absorption in his better days. Now there's almost no self to preoccupy him--just a few random shards of cranky sense that senility has unaccountably left him.

The burden of caring for him falls mainly on his middle daughter Eve (Meg Ryan), who is trying to get a business going and keep a family functioning. Her elder sister Georgia (Diane Keaton, who also directed) is a high-powered, terminally distracted Manhattan magazine editor. Her younger sibling Maddy (Lisa Kudrow) is a soap-opera actress. These ladies, needless to say, have their own messy, unresolved issues.

Which are perhaps too predictable. And they get papered over in an easy ending that would look simpy even on a comedy. Before it arrives, however, Hanging Up reminds us, as most movies refuse to do, that the only thing death can possibly inspire in us is dread.

--By Richard Schickel