Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
Directed by Woody Allen

Film Review

Although its director might argue otherwise (an artist is always the most unreliable critic of his work), Hannah and Her Sisters could well be Woody Allen's masterpiece.  It is certainly one of his biggest successes, both commercially and critically, and it received no fewer than seven Oscar nominations, winning in the categories of Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actor (Michael Caine) and Best Supporting Actress (Dianne Wiest).  Melancholic slices of life are imbued with Allen's distinctive flair for humour and observation, in a film that draws together all of the essential themes of the director's work - his philosophy on life, his agnosticism over the durability of love, his intense fascination with the complexities of relationships.  Somehow, almost magically, all of this is woven into a supremely eloquent and moving meditation on love, life and death - a bittersweet cinematic poem that resonates with truth and feeling.

The quality of Allen's script (arguably his best to date) is made apparent by the flawless performances from a remarkable ensemble of acting talent, with the title role Hannah going to Mia Farrow, the director's muse and real-life partner at the time.  Allen was dissatisfied with the film because he felt he was forced, through a failure of the imagination, into tagging on a happy ending, but if he seriously believes this he has totally no conception of the raison d'être of the magnum opus he signed his name to.   Surely the whole point of Hannah and Her Sisters is that happiness is a fiction that we are all forced to create for ourselves in order to make life bearable.  Love and happiness do not exist.  We must invent them, as a child may conjure into being an invisible friend, to prevent us from tumbling into the abyss of despair upon realising that life is essentially meaningless.

Deception and delusion impinge on just about every scene that makes up the rambling patchwork narrative of the film.  Even the title is misleading as Hannah, whilst being the nexus around which all of the events revolve, turns out to be the least significant and the least well-developed of the principal characters.  For most of the film, she stands apart like a mighty oak in a stormswept landscape, entirely self-sufficient and always ready to help others, whilst everyone around her is scurrying hither and thither like a helpless insect, desperately seeking comfort and security.  Most of the dramatic focus is directed towards her two sisters, Lee and Holly, who look on Hannah with envy and admiration as they drift from one personal crisis to another.  Lee seems destined to spend her life hooking up with one unsuitable male partner after another, not really knowing what true love is but all too willing to fall for the illusion of love.  Meanwhile Holly looks like a complete washout, unable to get her life back on track after kicking the drugs habit.  In one crucial scene, the camera circles repeatedly around the sisters, seemingly binding them together with yards and yards of invisible thread as they confide in one another.  It is here that we see how alike they really are.  She may not show it, but Hannah is just as lost as her sisters, and far from being strong and dependable, she may actually be the weakest and nastiest of the three siblings.  She reveals as much in later scenes.

Even more fragile and confused than the three titular sisters are the two male protagonists - Hannah's seemingly devoted husband Elliot (an exemplary Michael Caine) and her ex-partner Mickey, a typically Allenesque neurotic played by - who else? - Woody Allen himself.  In the first third of the film, Allen's character appears to be peripheral to the central drama, which is mostly concerned with the love affair between Elliot and Lee and its likely impact on Hannah and Lee's present partner, a pathologically gloomy artist.   (Appropriately, the latter is played by Max von Sydow, the star of several films of the European director Allen most admired, Ingmar Bergman.)  Indeed, Mickey appears to gatecrash the film in the manner of a Shakespearean comic interloper, lightening the mood with his laughably over-the-top fears that he might have a life-threatening tumour.  (Allen has special genius for finding humour in the blackest of situations.) Mickey may make us laugh - hysterically in a few scenes - but he is the most tragic character of all as he seems congenitally incapable of looking on the bright side.  Love, religion, philosophy, even American television, all fail to address his basic need to understand what life is meant to be about and he is ready to throw in the towel when he is struck by a Damascene bolt whilst watching a Marx Brothers film.  (Allen may well have filched the idea from Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels (1941)).

This is the moment at which a fragmented and somewhat aimless mess of a film suddenly coalesces and attains a blinding coherence.  Just when he was least expecting it, Mickey has stumbled on what life is for.  Life isn't an enigma to be endlessly dissected and analysed like a frog being cut open by a schoolboy intent on 'seeing how it works'.  Life is an experiential journey, a rolling tapestry on which each of us has a brief span to participate in the great event that is conscious existence.  To ask what it all means is as futile as looking for an ontological purpose behind a Laurel and Hardy film.  Apparently cured of his neuroses, Mickey then goes off to construct his own 'happy ending', no longer caring that it might be a cardboard sham built on the ricketiest of delusions.  It is then that we realise that all of the other characters in the drama are reflections of Mickey, even the so seemingly well-adjusted Hannah.

The film's cyclical structure - it begins and ends with a jolly family get-together at Thanksgiving - suggests a permanency in human relationships that is nothing more than wilful self-deception.  Hannah and her entourage are only happy because they have made the choice to be happy, just as Mickey at one point makes the existential choice between life and death.  The relationships which appeared rock solid at the start of the film look like a fragile compromise by the final scene.  Elliot and Hannah are together again - but you wonder for how long after the latter's discovery of her husband's infidelity.  Lee has found a new beau - a shallow, self-loving architect who will no doubt be ditched when the next unsuitable partner comes along.  Holly and Mickey could not be happier as they embark on their life together, and they may even stay the course.  In the background we see Hannah's elderly parents, bitter and weary after a lifetime of disappointments but still together.  In the very final shot, tellingly reflected in a mirror, we glimpse Mickey overjoyed at the news that Holly is pregnant.  Has he so readily forgotten that he is supposed to be infertile?  Hold onto the lie - it is all we have.

Film Synopsis

Hannah is a successful stage actress who has recently taken an extended career break so that she can raise a family with her second husband, Elliot, a financial adviser.  She has two sisters, Lee and Holly, who both lead more unsettled and unfulfilled lives.  At present, Lee is living with a misanthropic artist, Frederick, more out of pity than love as she no longer derives any satisfaction from the relationship.  Meanwhile, Holly is struggling to rebuild her life after overcoming her dependency on drugs.  She runs a catering business with her friend April but hankers after resuming her career in show business.  As Elliot and Lee embark on a clandestine love affair that both feel guilty about but neither can resist, Hannah's ex-husband Mickey, a hypochondriac television producer, becomes convinced that he has an inoperable brain tumour.  When a medical examination reveals that he is perfectly healthy, Mickey's initial elation at being 'let off the hook' soon turns to despair and he becomes morbidly obsessed with finding meaning in his life...