Hannah and Her Sisters

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) follows three sisters and the people around them between two Thanksgivings. Hannah is the steady one everybody leans on. Lee lives with an artist and begins an affair with Hannah's husband. Holly cannot find a career and keeps asking for money. Hannah's ex husband Mickey, frightened of death after a medical scare, goes looking for religion. The film is cut into sections, each opening with a title card, and the narrator keeps changing. The same event is given twice through two people's interior voices. The shoot was built around a real home. Hannah's apartment is Mia Farrow's own, on Central Park West. Maureen O'Sullivan, playing Hannah's mother, was Farrow's actual mother. Farrow's own children appear in the Thanksgiving scenes. In her memoir Farrow wrote that the family went on living there through filming and that the place was chaos. Mickey's section is the funniest part, moving between fear of death and a search for religion. Michael Caine won supporting actor and Dianne Wiest supporting actress. The screenplay won as well. It is among Allen's biggest commercial successes. It runs 107 minutes. Good for: character comedy, family stories, and New York films. Less good for: it is dialogue heavy, the characters are self absorbed, and some of the relationships are uncomfortable.