[6.8/10] *Hannah and Her Sisters* is a sidewinding ramble of a film. It’s not so much a story as it is a series of interconnected, slice-of-life vignettes and interludes. The tethers between its various stories are frayed, and sometimes contrived. Despite a sense of realism in the presentation, the characters scan as larger than life, the sort of exaggerated, dysfunctional New York City socialites that writer-director Woody Allen specializes in. And as a result, the whole thing leaves me a bit cold.

To the extent the film has a broader point or theme, it seems to be about the absurd rush of years and events, where seeming stability can turn to tumult and even grave distress before settling into some sort of unexpected cobbled-together happiness. After flitting from bad pairing to bad pairing, Lee finds love and marriage. After a year of infidelity and estrangement, Elliot realizes he does “love Hannah more than he realizes” and they seem to have settled back in as husband and wife. And after a year of existential dread and dispiriting rejection respectively, Mickey and Holly find love, success, and most surprisingly, a baby on the way.

But for the most part, it’s filled with characters I don’t really care for, in soap opera relationships I don’t really buy. Michael Caine’s Elliot is a repugnant cad who cheats on his wife with her sister. The sister, Lee, is in a patronizing relationship with an affected, older artist, and has little compunction about betraying her sister. You feel a bit for the third sister, Holly, who’s outshined by her supposed best friend at every turn, but she’s also naive and ungrateful to the titular Hannah who supports her both emotionally and monetarily.

They run into other players here and there, from a pretentious architect to some squabbling parents, to a hapless rock star, but none of them are much fun to spend time with. In fairness, I take that to be the point, at least in part. In line with other works of the period, there’s a sense of artistic rebellion of the Reagan “Morning in America” image, peeling back to show the dysfunction and disaffection of outwardly idyllic family life. There’s something uncomfortable about all of this, in a way that’s deliberate, and discomfort and even revulsion is a valid reaction to go for from your audience. But much of the dysfunction and character choices and happenstance required to make it all hang together is too caricatured to be interesting in lieu of being endearing.

Except when it isn’t. Despite the outsized, borderline cartoonishness in places, occasionally *Hannah and Her Sisters* gets startlingly real. The scene where Lee confesses her infidelity to longtime partner, Frederick, has a vulnerability and electricity that’s missing from most of the film. The scene includes some great, big-but-believable performances from Barbara Hershey and Max Von Sydow, and some sharp blocking and staging that underscores the emotional distance between their characters.

Likewise, the scene where Hannah realizes her husband, Elliot, must have been betraying intimate details of their marriage to her sisters and confronts him, while Elliot is flummoxed by Lee breaking off their affair, comes with a combination of anger and woundedness, a byproduct of a marriage in crisis, that grabs your attention. In the same way, it’s melded with the creative choice to follow their fight from behind a slammed door.

And the showpiece scene of the film comes when the titular three sisters come together for a meal, and Lee’s sense of guilt and self-loathing, Holly’s sense of resentment and lack of esteem, and Hannah’s sense of giving and giving even though it’s never enough explode into one emotionally fraught lunch table scene. There too, cinematographer Carlo di Palma’s choices accentuate the mood of the moment, swirling around the trio of siblings in a way that dovetails with the tumultuous flow of the conversations and emotions at play.

Part of it works because there’s one truly sympathetic character in this -- Hannah herself. This figure, played with a steady grace, layered interiority, and sad resignation by Mia Farrow, is the one giving person holding all of these nuts together. Watching her search for answers from supposed confidantes where none are forthcoming, flit helplessly above unknown but keenly felt betrayals from loved ones, and look with sadness on her parents lives and worry about the future is softly heartbreaking. In a movie where it’s hard to warm to or sympathize with many of the players, Hannah is a pathos-ridden figure worth caring about.

By contrast, Allen’s character Mickey is, well, a Woody Allen character. He’s a nebbishy hypochondriac stuck on the emptiness of an existence destined to end, a set of elements that are all but off-the-shelf for the man, even by the mid-1980s. And yet, with all the peculiar drama going along with the main line of Hannah’s extended family, Mickey’s overanxious “brush” with death and subsequent speedrun through a buffet of the meaning of life is an unexpectedly welcome comic interlude.

Say what you will about the rest of the film, but in choice stretches, *Hannah and Her Sisters* is funny! A grand dame calling her husband “that haircut of a man” is a choice burn. Mickey telling his date, “I had a great evening; it was like the Nuremberg Trials,” is a knee-slapper. And Mickey’s father declaring, “How the hell do I know why there were Nazis? I don't know how the can opener works!” is both quite funny and unassumingly profound.

The same goes for most of Mickey’s quest for meaning. The absurdity of Mickey’s quest for meaning, leading him everywhere from a jar of mayonnaise to contemplating dancing around “like Jerry Lewis” is silly as hell. But where he ends up, with nothing less than a Marx Brothers film reminding him that however impermanent life may be, there’s joys that make it worth the experience, is a reassuring and even sweet landing spot.

Then, of course, he has to get mired again in the family drama, and folks, I just don’t know. A harried individual finding an unexpected sense of peace in the midst of his trouble through the pleasing absurdities of cinema? That I can buy. All of these people who hurt themselves, and one another, conveniently finding themselves paired up and ostensibly happy by the end of the film? That I have more trouble with.

For a film centered on the dysfunction and maladaptation of nearly every character in the roster, there’s a peculiar sense of “If you just let these things work themselves out, almost by chance, everything might end up just fine.” The ending feels optimistic, almost cheerful in its Thanksgiving setting, in a way that seems almost disconnected from the rest of the movie.

Or maybe it isn’t. Lee leapt from bad relationship to bad relationship in the year we see her. Who’s to say her marriage to a professor from one of her classes, another questionable power imbalance, won’t end just as badly? Elliot spends most of the film veering back and forth between his infatuation with Lee and his devotion to Hannah. Who’s to say his mercurial sentiments won’t shift again? And Holly and Mickey drift from acting to catering to musical to writing, and from Judaism to Catholicism to Hare Krishna to post-suicidal euphoria. Maybe they’ll give each other the stability and validation each has been searching for. But who’s to say this is just another way station before they dither their way to something else?

But in truth, this is trying to squint and find a structure in a pile of scattered matchsticks. Allen and company do their best to sew all these stories together, through a bizarre family tree, through chance meetings, and through a major holiday that serves as an inflection point for it all.

At its best, the film captures the unsteady rhythms of life, that quicken or slacken, and don’t necessarily fit neatly into the kind of narrative structure that Aristotle would be proud of. In its strongest moments, *Hannah and Her Sisters* illustrates the shagginess of life, and with that comes a certain authenticity.

But at its worst, it’s an aimless collection of stories of less-than-likable people that don’t really fit together -- either the people or the stories. Watching them smushed together for an hour and forty-five minutes provokes a reaction, but I’m not sure it’s the one Allen and company had in mind.

The funny thing about googling something like "best Woody Allen movies" is that there doesn't seem to be a general consensus as to what his best works might be and that order in which they should appear. For whatever reason, "Hannah and Her Sisters" had fallen down the order of our "to watch" list.

For much of the first half of the movie I had my moments where I doubted that quality of the film as it seemed as though it was a poorer version of some of his other works. For example, you saw the neurotic Woody Allen, the stammering female lead (Mia Farrow, who I've never thought was particularly great), and commentary on relationships. The plot was slow in developing and at times I found myself a little bored.

It was at that time that I realized that I had been missing the whole point of the movie. The movie wasn't necessarily about relationships or neurosis or adultery. It was about the different stages of life that we pass through and how we all interact in our different phases. Shakespeare really had it right - all of the world is indeed a stage and we are all players and everyone is the audience. It was completely necessary for a long and protracted first half of the movie because it takes time to show the phases that we go through and how our phases affect the phases that other people experience.

Overall I thought this movie was very good. It had one characteristic that I use to measure the quality of a good movie: I was still mulling it over hours and days after I watched it.

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