Target Audience. It's not a particularly appealing phrase, if you think about it. No one wants to be a target--it conjures up ideas of running away from a speeding bullet. But in Hollywood, knowing your target audience is one of the most important dynamics in getting your movie produced. "Who's going to come and see it?" executives want to know.

Diane Keaton's new film, Hanging Up, for all of its faults, at least knows who its audience is. Women, aged 30-55 who are feeling as if life has gotten too stressful and, worse yet, no one seems to care. If that describes you, boy do I have a movie for you.

The movie is about, as anyone who's seen the commercials knows, three sisters: Georgia (Diane Keaton), Maddy (Lisa Kudrow) and Eve (Meg Ryan). What the commercials don't tell you is that the film is really about Meg Ryan's character, Eve Marks. The other two are merely foils for her story.

Hanging Up opens with a phone conversation between Eve and her father (Walter Matthau). He's about to be committed to a hospital as his senility has reached dangerous proportions. Eve, distraught about this event, is trying to counsel him and, in separate phone calls, get support from her sisters. But they're too wrapped up in their own career, in Georgia's case, or vacation to offer more than superficial moral support.

For Eve, who loves her father, this lack of feeling is inexplicable. But, as the movie shows, Eve cares deeply about almost everything: her husband and child, her fledgling business, her estranged mother and, most of all, her father. As for her sisters, they seem to care only for themselves.

This dichotomy is central to the film's message--that I (the target audience living vicariously through Meg Ryan) am the only one who isn't selfish, that I'm the only one who's trying to make the world a better place. My older sister is obsessed with her successful magazine (named after herself), and my younger sister flits from job to job, boyfriend to boyfriend, more concerned about her dog than her own father. To make things  worse, sometimes my dad actually mistakes me for someone else. Doesn't anyone realize that I'm the only one holding the world together? 

This constant whining is further amplified by Ryan's portrayal. Constantly in high-squeal mode, she (and the film) never slows down, repeatedly crying into the phone or complaining to her long-suffering husband (Alan Arkin, Chicago Hope). Not that Ryan is a poor actor, but the non-stop intensity of her performance is both tiring and, after a while, counter-productive. At first, we empathize with her plight but then grow progressively less sympathetic.

In contrast, we never sympathize with Eve's sisters. Georgia is the stereotypical type-A woman who flawlessly runs her own company but can't see past her office door. This self-aggrandizement reaches its apex when she steals Eve's stuffing recipe and passes it off as her own in the New York Times. Maddy is no better. While considerably more flighty (continuing  the typecasting Kudrow routinely endures), she is just as self-absorbed.  This finds its fulfillment when she asks over-worked Eve to take care of her enormous St. Bernard.

In contrast to many women's films, the men come off ok in Hanging Up. While Matthau merely has to replay his old curmudgeon for the 58th time, he is genuinely sweet when he's not a raving lunatic. And being the only character capable of telling a joke, he gets many of the best lines. Alan Arkin is truly saint-like as Eve's husband, though admittedly he has little to do on-screen.

It probably goes without saying that Hanging Up must reach some sort of resolution, and it's no surprise that the catalyst is the deteriorating condition of dad. I won't give any plot twists away, but I suspect those who've taken Eve's journey in their own lives (the target audience) might find it affecting. For myself, I hung up long before the movie's conclusion.

J. Robert Parks 2/6/2000

Postscript: For those who've been following the growing debate over ratings and the MPAA's perspective on content, there's a particularly revealing episode in Hanging Up. Halfway through the movie, Matthau's character blows up in a curse-filled rant. While it's clear from his lips that he says the f-word at least twice, the sound is obviously dubbed to say something different. Later in one of the movie's climactic moments, Ryan's character uses the f-word twice. It's apparent that two uses of that word would not require an R-rating, but four uses would. The producers, conscious of the need for a PG-13- rating artlessly removed the offending words. While I think ratings actually serve a useful purpose and that excessive language rarely adds anything, this obvious hypocrisy only undermines the rating system.