Keep the line open for 'Hanging Up'

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Starring: Meg Ryan, Diane Keaton,

Lisa Kudrow, Walter Matthau

Director: Diane Keaton

Studio: Columbia

Running time: 92 min

Rating: yyyy

What do you do when you find yourself in a borderline-dysfunctional family? And how do you cope with the fact that the man who singlehandedly made you that way is about to go out of your life forever? The process of discovering answers to these questions is at the core of Hanging Up, which gets a little stuck on itself but still manages to deliver on its promises.

The movie opens amid a flurry of phone calls among three sisters who all have their plates very full at the moment. Georgia (Diane Keaton) is gearing up for the fifth anniversary of her self-titled women's magazine, Eve (Meg Ryan) has a major-league reception to prepare, and Maddy (Lisa Kudrow) is doing her best to take a break from the soap opera she stars in.

Life rolls along at its usual frenetic pace for the trio until Eve gets a call telling her that their father Lou (Walter Matthau) is in poor health and on his way to the hospital. His years of freewheeling have finally caught up with him, and now it falls to his girls (mostly to Eve, the middle child) to handle the reality of his approaching death.

Easy? No. And it gets even less so in light of the less-than-normal home life they had: an eccentric father who never knew when to lay off the pills and booze, combined with a mother who decided that raising children was more than she could handle-so she vanished and left them to fend for themselves. Georgia looked after Eve, who in turn kept an eye on Maddy, and all three did their best to deal with Lou's earnest but twisted efforts at affection.

The story focuses on Eve, as it should; as the middle child, she has the most to deal with in terms of taking care of both Lou and her own family. In the process, though, her sisters almost become incidental players for most of the film. Even when they move a little closer to center stage, they seem more like caricatures than serious characters.

Keaton plays Georgia as a stereotypical overzealous working woman ready to climb over anyone to move ahead, while Kudrow's Maddy is Shallow and Superficial Starlet #125 (she insists on wearing a cast when she visits Lou because her soap character has a broken leg at the time).

Ryan picks up her costars' slack just as Eve does the same for her sisters, letting her devotion to Lou practically turn her into everybody else's punching bag.

As the title suggests, telephones play a key role in the film. In the office, in the car, at home, at the hospital, on vacation-nobody ever knows when the next call is going to come in or who has what news for whom. This is where Ryan shines; you almost expect her to jump straight up to the ceiling when the phone starts ringing, and calls from a rambling and disoriented Lou (neatly brought off thanks to Matthau's comedic touch) only push her closer to the edge.

Anyone who has had to face a situation like the one presented in Hanging Up will understand what can happen to a family under extreme stress. Something always breaks, but the real challenge is to put it back in working order. The film draws its strength from exploring this issue and is worth a look. (But turn off the cell phone before you drive to the theater, unless you want your car to look like Eve's before the night is over.)