Review of Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) by Jeffrey G — 06 Jan 2009

Hannah and Her Sisters portrays many things very closely to the way they are in reality, like a relationship between sisters and three different types of men in their own forms of mid-life crisis.

Woody Allen serves as his own comic relief, hilariously punctuating studious scenes of drama and character entanglement with the role you always expect him to play every time without fail. I found Michael Caine to be an interesting choice for Woody and a very pleasant presence on screen as always, no matter what movie he's in or who he's playing. Though his role isn't the most interesting or fleshed out, he still absorbs you in his time on screen and completely becomes his character. Mia Farrow has never been quite as interesting as the other actresses in Allen's films, but as she did in The Purple Rose of Cairo, she moves me with her ability to portray an emotionally and socially ungraceful person. Dianne Wiest and Barbara Hershey, playing her two sisters, are very enjoyably different from each other, Wiest tackling the role as the one whose tastes and needs are always different from those around her and Hershey playing the most receptive and sensitive of the three. Both actresses very clearly communicate their characters. Max von Sydow serves a handful of screen time as a perfect English-speaking carbon copy of any given role he ever played in his days as Ingmar Bergman's leading man, adapting in a down-to-earth Manhattan setting as actually a very realistic self-centered social critic, bringing an interesting ruffle to the movie's cast.

Like most of Woody Allen's films, it is very very well-made. His movies always have a simplistic, deadpan use of the camera that works quite well, a lot of the time keeping the camera stationary in the hallway as the characters leave and go from room to room, passing the camera by as it sits, almost as if it were the point of view of the house itself watching its residents go through life. In Hannah and Her Sisters, there are a few great moments where the camera is used to great and unpredicted comical effect. He also uses music very well in this film. The constant, old-fashioned, eclectic soundtrack plays in nearly every scene and when one scene jumps to another, the changing music will contradict the last piece of music from the previous scene.

Hannah and Her Sisters is a great film to watch if you love New York, if you love people, if you can identify with life. Woody Allen may be especially particular when it comes to subject matter, save for those rare leaps he makes with films like The Purple Rose of Cairo, Shadows and Fog, Match Point, Scoop, and a few others, but somehow no matter how stale his work seems to get, he always has you leave feeling like you've explored or learned something new.