I did not grow up in a large family—I count among my relations one sibling and a handful of cousins—and certainly not in a blended family: My dear parents were married once, to each other, for 44 years, until my father died in 2010. My mother never remarried. Yet when I recall my childhood and adolescence, I am struck by the sheer clamor that rings in my ears: the talk, the chatter, the ding of kitchen pots and pans, the crash of the backdoor. My father’s whistle upon coming home from a business trip; my mother’s laugh when she saw something funny on TV.
Now, deep into adulthood, I sometimes wonder where all that sound has gone, but I am reminded of it whenever I revisit Woody Allen’s 1986 comedy-drama Hannah and Her Sisters, which, among its other attributes, conjures the splendid racket of family life. Forty years ago, this was an unexpected achievement for the filmmaker: Among the 13 features Allen made prior to Hannah, many of them masterpieces, virtually none portray family life with deep curiosity or anything resembling affection.
Allen preferred to cast himself as a solitary figure traipsing through periods of bachelorhood. He is notably and warily divorced in both Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), and in Stardust Memories (1980), perhaps his best film to that point, he cannot even conceive of himself as having participated in a failed marriage: His character is a comic filmmaker who vacillates between preferring warm-blooded Marie-Christine Barrault and cheerless Charlotte Rampling. Even in his debut, 1969’s Take the Money and Run, Allen’s conception of the family unit is highly attenuated: When imbecilic bank robber Virgil Starkwell (Allen) is informed by his bride Louise (Janet Margolin) that she is pregnant, Virgil seems to require a refresher course on the facts of life to fathom how such a thing might have occurred. Yes, Allen’s Eugene O’Neill-accented domestic drama Interiors (1978) has at its center a large family—E.G. Marshall and Geraldine Page are the parents to a trio of sullen grown daughters (Diane Keaton, Mary Beth Hurt, Kristin Griffith)—but it is splintered, unfriendly, quiet. Upon receiving a bit of bad news, a character in Interiors is more liable to place her hand over her mouth than to vocalize an opinion. That’s not family—not to me.
Hannah and Her Sisters, then, must have seemed like a brilliant surprise at the time. Here, Allen not only presented a lively, vigorous family of many branches but did so with a fulsome sense of the deep satisfactions that can accompany it. Yes, the film depends on its family’s trials and tribulations—mostly of the romantic sort, sometimes of the life-and-death sort—as the source of its comedy and its drama, but Allen does not overstate the case as he did in Interiors or would later in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), which is in many ways Hannah as seen through a glass darkly.
The opening scene deposits us into the action. “God, she’s beautiful,” Elliot (Michael Caine), the dutiful, business-minded husband of Hannah (Mia Farrow), says to himself about the first of Hannah’s sisters, Lee (Barbara Hershey). The time is Thanksgiving, and the place is Elliot and Hannah’s fancy Manhattan apartment—the sort where, despite the high rent and general ambience of luxury, a certain warm, hemmed-in feeling persists. Each room is stuffed with beautiful furnishings, expensive bric-a-brac, carpets on the floor, and, above all, contented, well-fed people—or well-fed anyway. One need not be a resident of Manhattan or even a member of a teeming family to relate.
Lee is among the numerous extended family members who crowd this cozy habitation on Turkey Day. Also present is Hannah’s other sister, Holly (Dianne Wiest), whose drug habit, ill-directed ambition (including stints as an actress, writer, and, pathetically, caterer), and generally inflated sense of her own potential lead her to repeatedly request loans from Hannah. The senior members of this Thanksgiving party are the parents of the sisters (Lloyd Nolan and Maureen O’Sullivan, Farrow’s real-life mother)—slick, bumptious showbiz types who have accumulated an abundance of grievances to trot out when the occasion warrants.
A family this multitudinous needs an anchor point, an eye in the hurricane, and—despite the presence of her parents—the unquestioned materfamilias is Hannah.
She is clearly the most accomplished of her sisters (her acting career was evidently so successful that she has walked away from it voluntarily and only returns to it when the mood strikes her), and she operates with conspicuous cheerfulness in overseeing her blended family. (Twin boys were the product of her previous marriage to Allen’s character, TV comedy writer Mickey.) She fields those financial requests from Holly while tending to the dressing, and later, she takes time away from her schedule—surely as packed as those monthly calendars Martha Stewart used to print in her magazine—to smooth out a dispute between her parents. Allen presents her as a figure of upright magnanimity—a great virtuous heroine, as Whit Stillman might put it.
Nonetheless, Elliot commences an affair with Lee, who consents to a series of assignations but is properly guilt-ridden: She knows extramarital relations are wrong, and she knows they are especially wrong when her sister is a party, and she knows they are even more wrong when that sister happens to be a sister like Hannah. Strikingly, Allen never comes close to validating Elliot’s crush on Lee or his boredom with his lovely wife.
Instead, the film conjures a universe in which those characters furthest from Hannah’s orbit are the most diminished. This includes Elliot, who wanders from the comforts of home. It also includes Lee’s consort, the punishing artist Frederick (Max von Sydow, from The Exorcist and the collected works of Ingmar Bergman), who commends a life of hermitic learning and art-making. He wouldn’t be caught dead at Hannah’s apartment for a holiday get-together. Allen’s character, Mickey, is no less adrift: Unmoored from family life, he tortures himself with visions of his demise, which he all but wills into existence when he conflates hearing loss with symptoms of a brain tumor. The point is not that Hannah is perfect but that life outside of the family, as presented by Allen and as represented by Hannah, is at least three-fifths Hobbesian: It may not be poor or necessarily short, but it is certainly solitary, nasty, brutish.
Remarkably, Allen orchestrates a series of restorations at the end of Hannah and Her Sisters, which wraps up on another Thanksgiving—this one not just hectic but happy. By now, Elliot and Hannah have achieved rapprochement, while Mickey has married Holly—previously the participant in an epically bad first date with her former brother-in-law. What’s more, Mickey and Holly are revealed to be expecting a child. The family is not only reconciled but growing. The news is revealed as the two embrace in front of a mirror; in the adjacent room, a candle has just been lit for dinner. “This celebration of family is essentially a celebration of sanity and of belonging to a group—of satisfying the need for human connections,” wrote Pauline Kael in her somewhat positive review in the New Yorker.
For Allen, at least in hindsight, the ending had something of the flavor of a concession. “I copped out a little on the film, I backed out a little at the end,” he told Stig Björkman in the interview book Woody Allen on Woody Allen. But the audiences who made the movie a decisive commercial success did not care; neither did the Oscar voters, who gave out statuettes to Caine, Wiest, and Allen himself (for Best Original Screenplay). Few things are more irresistible than visions of hearth and home.
Editor’s note: This retrospective review is one in a series celebrating 1986, arguably the greatest year in movies—inarguably if you’re Gen X.
Peter Tonguette is the Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
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