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All My Movies (Album Standard) (Updated 04/07/26)(839 Movies)

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Rader Tech: Meet the astronomy community Meet the astronomy community Super Box S7 Ultra | The Ultimate Way to Watch Content!

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Match Point (2005)

 


Match Point is a 2005 psychological thriller film written and directed by Woody Allen, and starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Scarlett Johansson, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Goode, Brian Cox, and Penelope Wilton. In the film, Rhys Meyers' character, a former professional tennis player, marries into a wealthy family, but his social position is threatened by his affair with his brother-in-law's girlfriend, played by Scarlett Johansson. The film deals with themes of morality and greed, and explores the roles of lust, money, and luck in life, leading many to compare it to Allen's earlier film Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). It was produced and filmed in London after Allen had difficulty finding financial support for the film in New York. The agreement obliged him to make it there using a cast and crew mostly from the United Kingdom. Allen quickly re-wrote the script, which was originally set in New York, for an English setting.

Critics in the United States praised the film and its English setting and welcomed it as a return to form for Allen. In contrast, reviewers from the United Kingdom treated Match Point less favourably, finding fault with the locations and especially the British idiom in the dialogues. Allen was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

Plot

Recently retired tennis pro Chris Wilton is hired as an instructor at an upscale London club. He becomes friendly with wealthy club member, Tom Hewett. Tom's sister, Chloe, is smitten with Chris, and they begin dating. During a family gathering, Chris meets Tom's American fiancée Nola Rice, an aspiring actress. They are immediately attracted to each other.

After Chloe persuades her father to give Chris an entry-level job at his company, he gradually blends into the family. While the clan gathers at the Wilton country house, Tom's mother, Eleanor, condescendingly questions Nola's struggling acting career, causing a dejected Nola to leave the house during a thunderstorm. Chris follows Nola and confesses his feelings for her. They kiss and have sex in a wheat field, but Nola considers the encounter a mistake while Chris wants an ongoing affair. Chris and Chloe marry, while Tom ends his relationship with Nola after falling in love with someone else.

Chloe is obsessed with becoming pregnant, though Chris acts ambivalent and tries to track down Nola. When he happens to run into her, they begin an affair. When Nola becomes pregnant, Chris panics. He tells her to get an abortion, but she wants them to raise the child together. Chris becomes distant from Chloe, who suspects he is having an affair, which Chris denies. Nola presses Chris to divorce Chloe. Though Chris finds Chloe boring, he is unwilling to give up his promising career and the affluent lifestyle their marriage affords him. Chris feels trapped and lies to both Chloe and Nola.

Tired of waiting, Nola angrily confronts Chris outside his office and threatens to tell Chloe everything. Desperate to cover it up, Chris later takes one of his father-in-law's hunting shotguns. He calls Nola saying he has good news and wants them to meet at her place. He gains entry into her neighbor Mrs. Eastby's flat and fatally shoots her, then stages a burglary by ransacking the rooms and stealing jewelry and prescription drugs. He hides in the hallway and kills Nola when she returns. He then meets Chloe at the theatre. Scotland Yard concludes the crime was likely committed by a drug addict. The next day, when the murder is reported in the news, Chris sneaks the shotgun back into the gun case. He and Chloe then announce to the family that she is pregnant.

Detective Banner contacts Chris to request an interview concerning the murders. Before meeting the detectives, Chris throws Mrs. Eastby's jewelry and medicines into the river. By chance, her wedding ring bounces off the railing and falls to the pavement. At the police station, Chris lies about his relationship with Nola, but Banner surprises him with her diary, in which Chris is extensively featured. He confesses his affair but denies any link to the murder. Chris appeals to the detectives to avoid involving him further to protect his marriage. They agree to be discreet.

Late one night, Nola and Mrs. Eastby appear as apparitions and warn Chris that his actions will have consequences. Nola berates him for his clumsy planning and execution, as if wanting to be caught; Chris defends his crimes, though wrong, were committed for a "grander scheme", and he can suppress his guilt. The same night, Banner dreams that Chris committed the murders. The next day, however, Banner's partner Dowd discredits his theory by revealing a drug addict found murdered on the streets had Eastby's ring. The detectives consider the case closed. Months later, Chloe has a baby boy. Tom blesses his newborn nephew with luck rather than greatness.

Cast

Production

The script was originally set in The Hamptons, a wealthy enclave in New York, but was transferred to London when Allen found financing for the film there.[5] The film was partly funded by BBC Films, which required that he make the film in the UK with largely local cast and crew. In an interview with The Observer, Allen explained that he was allowed "the same kind of creative liberal attitude that I'm used to", in London. He complained that the American studio system was not interested in making small films: "They only want these $100 million pictures that make $500m."[6] The production budget was an estimated $15 million.[7] A further change was required when Kate Winslet, who was supposed to play the part of Nola Rice, resigned a week before filming was scheduled to begin. Scarlett Johansson was offered the part, and accepted, but the character had to be re-written as an American. According to Allen, "It was not a problem... It took about an hour."[6]

Filming took place in London in the summer of 2004 over a seven-week schedule.[6] Some of the city's landmarks, such as Tate Modern, Norman Foster's "Gherkin" building at 30 St Mary Axe, Richard Rogers' Lloyd's building, the Royal Opera House, the Palace of Westminster, Blackfriars Bridge, and Cambridge Circus form a backdrop to the film.[8] The tennis club scenes were filmed at the Queen's Club.[6] One of the University of Westminster's Marylebone campus lecture theatres was also used. UK-based graffiti artist Banksy's Girl With Balloon appears briefly in the film. One of the Parliament View apartments at Lambeth Bridge was used for interiors of Chris and Chloe's apartment. The restaurant scene was shot at the Covent Garden Hotel.[9]

Themes

Woody Allen, 2006

The film's opening voiceover from Chris introduces its themes of chance and fate, which he characterises as simple luck, to him all-important. The sequence establishes the protagonist as an introvert, a man who mediates his experience of the world through deliberation, and positions the film's subjective perspective through his narrative eyes. Charalampos Goyios argued that this hero, as an opera lover, maintains a sense of distance from the outer world and that ramifications therein pale in comparison to the purity of interior experience.[10]

The film is a debate with Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, which Chris is seen reading early on, identifying him with the anti-hero Raskolnikov.[10] That character is a brooding loner who kills two women to prove that he is a superior being, but is racked by guilt and is finally redeemed by confession of his crime, the love of a young woman forced into prostitution, and the discovery of God. Chris is a brooding loner who kills a poor girl who loves him because he considers his interests superior to those around him, knows little guilt, and avoids detection through luck. Allen signals his intentions with more superficial similarities: both are almost caught by a painter's unexpected appearance in the stairwell, and both sleuths play cat and mouse with the suspect. Allen argues, unlike Dostoevsky, that there is neither God, nor punishment, nor love to provide redemption. The theme of parody and reversal of Dostoevsky's motifs and subject matter has been visited by Allen before, in his film Love and Death. In Love and Death, the dialogue and scenarios parody Russian novels, particularly those by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, such as The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Gambler, The Idiot, and War and Peace.[11] In Match Point, Allen moves the theme from parody to the more direct engagement of Dostoevsky's motifs and narratives.[11]

Allen revisits some of the themes he had explored in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), such as the existence of justice in the universe. Both films feature a murder of an unwanted mistress, and "offer a depressing view on fate, fidelity, and the nature of man".[12] That film's protagonist, Judah Rosenthal, is an affluent member of the upper-middle class having an extramarital affair. After he tries to break the affair off, his mistress blackmails him and threatens to go to his wife. Soon, Rosenthal decides to murder his mistress but is racked with guilt over violating his moral code. Eventually, he learns to ignore his guilt and go on as though nothing has happened. Philip French compared the two films' plots and themes in The Observer, and characterised Match Point's as a "clever twist on the themes of chance and fate".[13]

Money is an important motivator for the characters: both Chris and Nola come from modest backgrounds and wish to enter the Hewett family using their sex appeal. That family's secure position is demonstrated by their large country estate, and, early on in their relationships, both prospective spouses are supported by Mr. Hewett Wilton with a position on "one of his companies". Nola reports being "swept off her feet" by Hewett's attention and presents.[14] Roger Ebert posed the film's underlying question as "To what degree are we prepared to set aside our moral qualms in order to indulge in greed and selfishness? Wilton is facing a choice between greed and lust, but his sweet wife, Chloe, herself has no qualms about having her father essentially 'buy' her husband for her."[14]

Jean-Baptiste Morain, writing in Les Inrockuptibles, noticed how the strong do not accept their own weakness and have no qualms about perpetuating an injustice to defend their interests. This wider political sense is, he argued, accentuated by its English setting, where class differences are more marked than in the USA. The film pits passion and the dream of happiness against ambition and arrivisme, resolving the dispute with a pitiless blow that disallows all chance of justice.[15]

Musical accompaniment

The film's soundtrack consists almost entirely of pre-World War I 78 rpm recordings of opera arias sung by the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso. This bold use, despite Caruso's variety of musical styles, constitutes a first for Allen. Opera has been used before in his work as an indicator of social class, such as in Husbands and Wives (1992). In Match Point, the arias and opera extracts make an ironic commentary on the actions of the characters and sometimes foreshadow developments in the movie's narrative. Furthermore, given Chris's status as an introvert and opera enthusiast himself, the accompaniment emphasises his detachment from his crime.[10]

The 10-minute murder scene which forms the film's climax is scored with almost the whole of the Act II duet between Otello and Iago from Giuseppe Verdi's Otello. This is an atypical scoring for a film since Verdi's piece is not an aria, but a dramatic dialogue in which the words are as important as the music. Thus the astute spectator will be presented with two dramatic narratives to follow; Allen is not respecting traditional conventions of cinematic accompaniment since the score's events do not match the story unfolding onscreen.[10]

Arias and extracts include work by Verdi (in particular Macbeth, La traviata, Il trovatore and Rigoletto), Gaetano Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore, Georges Bizet's Les pêcheurs de perles, and Antônio Carlos Gomes's Salvator Rosa sung by Caruso. The romanza "Una furtiva lagrima" from L'elisir d'amore is featured repeatedly, including during the opening credits. The Caruso arias are supplemented by diegetic music from contemporary performances that the characters attend over the course of the film. There are scenes at the Royal Opera House and elsewhere performed by opera singers (scenes from La traviata performed by Janis Kelly and Alan Oke, from Rigoletto performed by Mary Hegarty), accompanied by a piano (performed by Tim Lole).[16]

Reception

Critical response

Allen has said that Match Point is one of his few "A-films", and even "arguably may be the best film that I've made. This is strictly accidental, it just happened to come out right. You know, I try to make them all good, but some come out and some don't. With this one, everything seemed to come out right. The actors fell in, the photography fell in and the story clicked. I caught a lot of breaks!"[17]

The film was screened out of competition at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.[18] Match Point broke a streak of box office flops for Allen: it earned $85,306,374 worldwide, of which $23,151,529 was in its North American run.[7] Allen was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.[19]

The film received favourable reviews from critics, particularly in the United States. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 77% based on 216 reviews with an average rating of 7.2/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Woody Allen's sharpest film in years, Match Point is a taut, philosophical thriller about class and infidelity."[20] Metacritic reported the film had an average score of 72 out of 100, and thus "generally favorable reviews", based on 40 professional critics.[21] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale.[22]

Roger Ebert gave the film a full four stars, and considered it among the four best Allen films.[23] He described it as having a "terrible fascination that lasts all the way through".[14] Empire magazine gave the film four stars out of five, calling it Allen's best of his last half a dozen films, and recommended it even to those who are not fans of the director.[24]

Reviewers in the United Kingdom were generally less favourable. Philip French, writing in The Observer, criticised Allen's grasp of British idiom and the film's lack of humour, especially considering that two comic actors from the UK were cast in minor roles. Also, he called the dialogue "rather lumbering" and said that "the lexicons of neither the City financier nor the London constable are used convincingly."[13] Tim Robey, writing in The Daily Telegraph, disdained the claim that the film was Allen's return to form. Although he acknowledged that the consensus was stronger this time, he called it "as flat-footed a movie as Allen has ever made, a decent idea scuppered by a setting – London – which he treats with the peculiarly tin-eared reverence of a visitor who only thinks he knows his way around." He called Johansson's character "the chain-smoking mistress from hell", but said the tennis net analogy has an "unexpectedly crisp payoff" and that the last act was well handled.[25] Reviewing for the BBC's website, Andy Jacobs awarded the film four stars out of five and called it Allen's best film since Deconstructing Harry (1997). He also criticised some other British reviewers whose dislike, Jacobs stated, was due to the fact that Allen presented an agreeable portrait of middle-class life in London. He also praised the performances by Rhys Meyers and Johansson.[12]

Like many of Allen's films, Match Point was popular in France: AlloCiné, a cinema information website, gave it a score of 4.4 out of 5, based on a sample of 30 reviews.[26] In Les Inrockuptibles, a left-wing French cultural magazine, Jean-Baptiste Morain gave the film a strong review, calling it "one of his most accomplished films".[15] He characterised Allen's move to London as re-invigorating for him while recognising the caricatured portrayal of Britain which made the film less appreciated there than in Allen's homeland, the United States. Morain called Rhys-Meyers and Johansson's performances "impeccable".[15]

Match Point has also been the object of scholarship. Joseph Henry Vogel argued the film is exemplary of ecocriticism as an economic school of thought.[27] Several critics and commentators have compared elements of the film to the central plot of George Stevens' film A Place in the Sun (1951), but with some characters in reverse positions.[13][28]

Accolades

Award Date of ceremony Category Recipient Result Ref.
Academy Awards March 5, 2006 Best Original Screenplay Woody Allen Nominated [29]
César Awards February 25, 2006 Best Foreign Film Match Point Nominated [30]
Golden Eagle Award January 27, 2007 Best Foreign Language Film Match Point Nominated [31]
Golden Globe Awards January 16, 2006 Best Motion Picture – Drama Match Point Nominated [32]
Best Director Woody Allen Nominated
Best Screenplay Nominated
Best Supporting Actress Scarlett Johansson Nominated
National Board of Review January 10, 2006 Top Ten Films Match Point Top 10 [33]
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Zelig (1983)

 


Zelig is a 1983 American satirical mockumentary comedy film written, directed by and starring Woody Allen as Leonard Zelig, a nondescript enigma, who, apparently out of his desire to fit in and be liked, unwittingly takes on the characteristics of strong personalities around him. The film, presented as a documentary, recounts his period of intense celebrity during the 1920s, including analyses by contemporary intellectuals.

The film received critical acclaim and was nominated for numerous awards, including the Academy Awards for Best Cinematography and Costume Design.

Style

Zelig was photographed and narrated in the style of 1920s black-and-white newsreels, which are interwoven with archival footage from the era and re-enactments of real historical events. Color segments from the present day include interviews of real cultural figures, such as Saul Bellow and Susan Sontag, and fictional ones.

Plot

Set in the 1920s and 1930s, the film concerns Leonard Zelig (Woody Allen), a nondescript man who has the ability to transform his behavior and demeanor to that of the people who surround him. He is first observed at a party by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who notes that Zelig related to the affluent guests in a refined Boston accent and shared their Republican sympathies, but while in the kitchen with the servants, he adopted a coarser tone and seemed to be more of a Democrat. He soon gains international fame as a "human chameleon".

Interviewed in one of the witness shots, psychologist Bruno Bettelheim makes the following comment:[3]

The question of whether Zelig was a psychotic or merely extremely neurotic was a question that was endlessly discussed among his doctors. Now I myself felt his feelings were really not all that different from the normal, what one would call the well-adjusted, normal person, only carried to an extreme degree, to an extreme extent. I myself felt that one could really think of him as the ultimate conformist.

Dr. Eudora Fletcher (Mia Farrow) is a psychiatrist who wants to help Zelig with this strange disorder when he is admitted to her hospital.[4] Through the use of hypnotism, she discovers Zelig yearns for approval so strongly that he physically changes to fit in with those around him. Dr. Fletcher eventually cures Zelig of his compulsion to assimilate, but goes too far in the other direction; for a brief period he is so intolerant of others' opinions that he gets into a brawl over whether or not it is a nice day.

Dr. Fletcher realizes that she is falling in love with Zelig. Because of the media coverage of the case, both patient and doctor become part of the popular culture of their time. However, fame is the main cause of their division. Numerous women claim that he married and impregnated them, causing a public scandal. The same society that made Zelig a hero destroys him.

Zelig's illness returns, and he tries to fit in once more, before he disappears. Dr. Fletcher finds him in Germany working with the Nazis before the outbreak of World War II. Together they escape, as Zelig uses his ability to imitate one more time, mimicking Fletcher's piloting skills and flying them back home across the Atlantic upside down. They eventually return to America, where they are proclaimed heroes and marry to live full happy lives.

Cast

Susan Sontag, Irving Howe, Saul Bellow, Bricktop, Dr. Bruno Bettelheim and Professor John Morton Blum appear as themselves.

Production

Allen used newsreel footage, and inserted himself and other actors into it, using bluescreen technology.[5] To provide an authentic look to his scenes, Allen and cinematographer Gordon Willis used a variety of techniques, including locating some of the antique film cameras and lenses used during the eras depicted in the film, and simulating damage, such as crinkles and scratches, on the negatives to make the finished product look more like vintage footage. All of the production sound was recorded on antique carbon microphones. The virtually seamless blending of old and new footage was achieved almost a decade before digital filmmaking technology made such techniques much easier to accomplish, as seen in films such as Forrest Gump (1994) and various television advertisements.[6]

The film uses cameo appearances by real figures from academia and other fields for comic effect.[7] Contrasting the film's vintage black-and-white film footage, these persons appear in color segments as themselves, commenting in the present day on the Zelig phenomenon as if it really happened. They include essayist Susan Sontag, psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow, political writer Irving Howe, historian John Morton Blum, and the Paris nightclub owner Bricktop.

Also appearing in the film's vintage footage are Charles Lindbergh, Al Capone, Clara Bow, William Randolph Hearst, Marion Davies, Charlie Chaplin, Josephine Baker, Fanny Brice, Carole Lombard, Dolores del Río, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring, James Cagney, Jimmy Walker, Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, Adolphe Menjou, Claire Windsor, Tom Mix, Marie Dressler, Bobby Jones, and Pope Pius XI. Each of these public figures were represented in newsreel footage and many were also seamlessly portrayed by look-alike actors in the film.

In the time it took to complete the film's special effects, Allen completed A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (production started prior to the filming of Zelig) and filmed Broadway Danny Rose. This is Orion Pictures' last film to be released through Warner Bros.

Release

Before being shown at the Venice Film Festival, the film opened on six screens in the US and grossed US$60,119 on its opening weekend; it eventually earned US$11.8 million in North America.[1]

Critical reaction

Zelig has a 97% rating on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes based on 31 reviews, with an average score of 8/10. The site's consensus reads: "Wryly amusing, technically impressive, and ultimately thought-provoking, Zelig represents Woody Allen in complete command of his craft".[8]

In his review in The New York Times, Vincent Canby observed:

[Allen's] new, remarkably self-assured comedy is to his career what ... Berlin Alexanderplatz is to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's and ... Fanny and Alexander is to Ingmar Bergman's ... Zelig is not only pricelessly funny, it's also, on occasion, very moving. It works simultaneously as social history, as a love story, as an examination of several different kinds of film narrative, as satire and as parody ... [It] is a nearly perfect – and perfectly original – Woody Allen comedy.[9]

Variety said the film was "consistently funny, though more academic than boulevardier",[10] and The Christian Science Monitor called it "amazingly funny and poignant".[11] Time Out described it as "a strong contender for Allen's most fascinating film",[12] while TV Guide said, "Allen's ongoing struggles with psychoanalysis and his Jewish identity – stridently literal preoccupations in most of his work – are for once rendered allegorically. The result is deeply satisfying".[13] Gene Siskel gave the film two stars out of four, calling it "a beautifully made but slight fable."[14] Pauline Kael wrote that when the film was over "I felt good, but I was still a little hungry for a movie. There's a reason 'Zelig' seems small; there aren't any characters in it, not even Zelig."[15]

Colin Greenland reviewed Zelig for Imagine magazine, and stated that "Woody Allen's most irresistable film for quite a while. He has found a new way to make fun of his own neuroses without exposing us to the egoism which became so overbearing in Manhattan or Stardust Memories."[16]

It ranked 588th among critics, and 546th among directors, in the 2012 Sight & Sound polls of the greatest films ever made.[17] Chris Nashawaty of Entertainment Weekly listed the work as one of Allen's finest, lauding it as "a spot-on homage to vintage newsreels and a seamless exercise in technique."[18] The Daily Telegraph film critics Robbie Collin and Tim Robey also named it as a career highlight and argued, "The special effects, in which Allen is seamlessly inserted into vintage newsreels, are still astonishing, and draw out the aching tragicomedy of Zelig's plight. He's the original man who wasn't there."[19] Calum Marsh of Slant magazine wrote, "We are infinitely pliable. That's the thesis of Zelig, Allen's wisest film, which has much to say about the way a person can be bent and contorted in the name of acceptance. Its ostensibly wacky conceit ... is grounded in an emotional and psychological reality all too familiar to shrug off as farce. We'll go very far out of our way to avoid conflict. Zelig seizes on that weakness and forces us to recognize it."[20]

Accolades

Soundtrack

  • "Leonard the Lizard" (1983) – composed by Dick Hyman; sung by Bernie Kuce, Steve Clayton and Tony Wells
  • "Doin' the Chameleon" (1983) – composed by Dick Hyman; sung by Bernie Kuce, Steve Clayton and Tony Wells
  • "Chameleon Days" (1983) – composed by Dick Hyman; performed by Mae Questel
  • "You May Be Six People, But I Love You" (1983) – composed by Dick Hyman; sung by Bernie Kuce, Steve Clayton and Tony Wells
  • "Reptile Eyes" (1983) – composed by Dick Hyman; sung by Rose Marie Jun
  • "The Changing Man Concerto" (1983) – composed by Dick Hyman
  • "I've Got a Feeling I'm Falling" (1929) – music by Fats Waller (as Thomas 'Fats' Waller) and Harry Link; sung by Roz Harris
  • "I'm Sitting on Top of the World" (1925) – music by Ray Henderson; sung by Norman Brooks
  • "Ain't We Got Fun" (1921) – music by Richard A. Whiting; performed by The Charleston City All Stars
  • "Sunny Side Up" (1929) – music and lyrics by Ray Henderson, Lew Brown and Buddy G. DeSylva; performed by The Charleston City All Stars
  • "I'll Get By" (1928) – music by Fred E. Ahlert; performed by The Ben Bernie Orchestra
  • "I Love My Baby, My Baby Loves Me" (1925) – music by Harry Warren; performed by The Charleston City All Stars
  • "Runnin' Wild" (1922) – music by A. H. Gibbs; performed by The Charleston City All Stars
  • "A Sailboat in the Moonlight" (1937) – written by Carmen Lombardo and John Jacob Loeb (as John Loeb); performed by The Guy Lombardo Orchestra
  • "Charleston" (1923) – music by James P. Johnson; performed by Dick Hyman
  • "Chicago (That Toddlin' Town)" (1922) – written by Fred Fisher; performed by Dick Hyman
  • "Five Feet Two, Eyes of Blue" (1925) – music by Ray Henderson; performed by Dick Hyman
  • "Anchors Aweigh" (1906) – music by Charles A. Zimmerman; modified by Domenico Savino (1950); performed by Dick Hyman
  • "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" (1908) – music by Albert von Tilzer
  • "The Internationale" (1888) – music by Pierre De Geyter[24]
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Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)

 


Hannah and Her Sisters is a 1986 American comedy-drama film written and directed by Woody Allen. It tells the intertwined stories of an extended family over two years that begins and ends with a family Thanksgiving dinner. Allen also stars in the film, along with Mia Farrow as Hannah, Michael Caine as her husband, and Barbara Hershey and Dianne Wiest as her sisters. Alongside them, the film features Carrie Fisher, Lloyd Nolan (who died four months before the film's release), Maureen O'Sullivan, Max von Sydow, Daniel Stern, John Turturro, Lewis Black (in his film debut), and Julie Kavner.

Hannah and Her Sisters was, for a long time, Allen's biggest box office success, with a North American gross of US$40 million. The film won Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay (for Allen), Best Supporting Actor (for Caine), and Best Supporting Actress (for Wiest). It is often considered one of Allen's major works, with critics continuing to praise its writing and ensemble cast.

Plot

The story is told in three main story arcs, with most of it occurring during a 24-month period beginning and ending at Thanksgiving parties, held at The Langham, hosted by Hannah, and her husband, Elliot. Hannah serves as the stalwart hub of the narrative; most of the events of the film connect to her.

Elliot becomes infatuated with one of Hannah's sisters, Lee, and eventually begins an affair with her. Elliot attributes his behavior to his discontent with his wife's self-sufficiency and resentment of her emotional strength. Lee has lived for five years with a reclusive artist, Frederick, who is much older. She finds her relationship with Frederick no longer intellectually or sexually stimulating, in spite of (or maybe because of) Frederick's professed interest in continuing to teach her. She leaves Frederick after admitting to having a dalliance with Elliot. For the remainder of the year between the first and second Thanksgiving gatherings, Elliot and Lee carry on their affair despite Elliot's inability to end his marriage to Hannah. Lee finally ends the affair during the second Thanksgiving, explaining that she is finished waiting for him to commit and that she has started dating someone else.

Hannah's ex-husband Mickey, a television writer, is present mostly in scenes outside of the primary story. Flashbacks reveal that his marriage to Hannah fell apart after they were unable to have children because of his infertility. However, they had twins who are not biologically his, before divorcing. He also went on a disastrous date with Hannah's sister Holly, when they were set up after the divorce. A hypochondriac, he goes to his doctor complaining of hearing loss, and is frightened by the possibility that it might be a brain tumor. When tests prove that he is perfectly healthy, he is initially overjoyed, but then despairs that his life is meaningless. His existential crisis leads to unsatisfying experiments with religious conversion to Catholicism and an interest in Krishna Consciousness. Ultimately, a suicide attempt leads him to find meaning in his life after unexpectedly viewing the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup in a movie theater. The revelation that life should be enjoyed, rather than understood, helps to prepare him for a second date with Holly, which this time blossoms into love.

Holly's story is the film's third main arc. A former cocaine addict, she is an unsuccessful actress who cannot settle on a career. After borrowing money from Hannah, she starts a catering business with April, a friend and fellow actress. Holly and April end up as rivals in auditions for parts in Broadway musicals, as well as for the affections of an architect, David. Holly abandons the catering business after the romance with David fails and decides to try her hand at writing. The career change forces her once again to borrow money from Hannah, a dependency that Holly resents. She writes a script inspired by Hannah and Elliot, which greatly upsets Hannah. It is suggested that much of the script involved personal details of Hannah and Elliot's marriage that had been conveyed to Holly through Lee (having been transmitted first from Elliot). Although this threatens to expose the affair between Elliot and Lee, Elliot soon disavows disclosing any such details. Holly sets aside her script, and instead writes a story inspired by her own life, which Mickey reads and admires greatly, vowing to help her get it produced and leading to their second date.

A minor arc in the film tells part of the story of Norma and Evan. They are the parents of Hannah and her two sisters, and still have acting careers of their own. Their own tumultuous marriage revolves around Norma's alcoholism and alleged affairs, but the long-term bond between them is evident in Evan's flirtatious anecdotes about Norma while playing piano at the Thanksgiving gatherings.

By the time of the film's third Thanksgiving, Lee has married a literature professor she met while taking random classes at Columbia University. Hannah and Elliot have reconciled their marriage. The film's final shot reveals that Holly is married to Mickey and that she is pregnant.

Cast

(in order of appearance)

Uncredited (in order of appearance)
Tony Roberts Norman, Mickey's former partner in writing sitcoms
Sam Waterston David, the architect who points out to April and Holly his favorite buildings
Soon-Yi Previn Thanksgiving guest

Influences

Part of the film's structure and background is borrowed from Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander (1982). In both films, a large theatrical family gather for three successive years' celebrations (Thanksgiving in Allen's film, Christmas in Bergman's). The first of each gathering is in a time of contentment, the second in a time of trouble, and the third showing what happens after the resolution of the troubles. The sudden appearance of Mickey's reflection behind Holly's in the closing scene also parallels the apparition behind Alexander of the Bishop's ghost. Additional parallels can be found with Luchino Visconti's 1960 film Rocco and His Brothers, which, besides the connection to its name, also uses the structural device of dividing sections of the film for the different siblings' plot arcs.[2]

Production

The film was originally about a man who fell in love with his wife's sister. Woody Allen then re-read the novel Anna Karenina "and I thought, it's interesting how this guy gets the various stories going, cutting from one story to another. I loved the idea of experimenting with that."[3]

He was particularly intrigued by the character of Nicholas Levin "who can't seem to find any meaning to life, he's terribly afraid of dying. It struck home very deeply. I thought it would be interesting to do one story about the relationship between three sisters and one story about someone else and his obsession with mortality."[3]

Allen admits the role of Hannah was based on Farrow being "a romanticized perception of Mia. She's very stable, she has eight children now, and she's able to run her career and have good relationships with her sister and her mother. I'm very impressed with those qualities, and I thought if she had two unstable sisters, it would be interesting."[3]

Allen says he was also inspired by the title. "I thought I'd like to make a film called Hannah and Her Sisters", he said, saying this prompted him to give Hannah two sisters.[3] He was interested in making something about the relationship between sisters which he felt was more complex than that between brothers. "Maybe that comes from childhood; my mother had seven sisters and their children were female so all I knew were aunts and female cousins."[3]

Shooting began in October of 1984 in New York City, with Mia Farrow's real-life apartment being used.

Mia Farrow later wrote that Allen had been intrigued about the subject of sisters for a long time. His earlier co-stars Janet Margolin and Diane Keaton both had two sisters each, and Farrow had three. She says Allen gave her an early copy of Hannah and Her Sisters saying she could play whatever sister she wanted, but that "he felt I should be Hannah, the more complex and enigmatic of the sisters ... whose stillness and internal strength he likened to the quality Al Pacino projected in The Godfather".[4]

Farrow wrote, "It was the first time I criticized one of his scripts. To me, the characters seemed self-indulgent and dissolute in predictable ways. The script was wordy but it said nothing." She claims "Woody didn't disagree and tried to switch over to" an alternative idea, "but preproduction was already in progress, and we had to proceed".[5]

She later elaborated:

It was my mother's stunned, chill reaction to the script that enabled me to see how he had taken many of the personal circumstances and themes of our lives, and, it seemed, had distorted them into cartoonish characterizations. At the same time he was my partner. I loved him. I could trust him with my life. And he was a writer: this is what writers do. All grist for the mill. Relatives have always grumbled. He had taken the ordinary stuff of our lives and lifted it into art. We were honored and outraged.[6]

Farrow admitted "a small sick feeling ... deep inside me" which "I shared with nobody was my fear that Hannah and Her Sisters had openly and clearly spelled out his feelings for my sister. But this was fiction, I told myself ... So I put those thoughts out of my mind."[6]

Release

The film premiered at the US Film Festival in Utah on January 25, 1986.[7]

The film was screened out of competition at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival.[8]

Box office

Hannah and Her Sisters opened on February 7, 1986, in 54 theaters, where it grossed $1,265,826 ($23,441 per screen) in its opening weekend, the first time an Allen film had debuted in theaters in cities other than New York City.[9] When it expanded to 761 theaters on March 14, it garnered a respectable $2,707,966 ($3,809 per screen). It went on to gross $40,084,041 in the United States and Canada (including a re-release the following year), and remains one of the highest-grossing Woody Allen films.[10] Adjusted for inflation it falls behind Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), and possibly also one or two of his early comedies.[11] Midnight in Paris (2011) surpassed its box office as well.

Reception

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 91% based on 56 reviews, with an average rating of 8.40/10. The site's critics consensus reads: "Smart, tender, and funny in equal measure, Hannah and Her Sisters is one of Woody Allen's finest films."[12] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 90 out of 100, based on 12 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[13] The film received seven Academy Award nominations including Best Picture. Allen received two Academy Award nominations, winning one for Best Screenplay, Original and he earned a nomination for Best Director. His work on the film was also recognized with two BAFTA Awards.

Critics Siskel and Ebert each rated the film among the top three of the 1986 film year; Roger Ebert's 1986 review of the film called it "the best movie [Woody Allen] has ever made".[14][15] Three years later when the two critics discussed their lists of the 10 best films of the 1980s, Ebert, who had included no comedies on his list, stated that had he been required to include one, it would have been Hannah And Her Sisters.

Vincent Canby, of The New York Times, gave the film a highly favorable review, going as far as to say that it "sets new standards for Mr. Allen as well as for all American movie makers".[16][17]

A poll of 100 film critics named Hannah and Her Sisters the best film of the year, after it appeared on 71 individual top ten lists.[18]

In 2005, the Writers Guild of America, West ranked Allen's script the 95th among the 101 greatest screenplays ever written.[19]

In October 2013, the film was voted by readers of The Guardian as the fourth best film directed by Woody Allen.[20]

In 2014, Calum Marsh of Slant Magazine named Hannah and Her Sisters as Allen's greatest film, praising its ensemble cast and Allen's "dense, heady script" for its "balancing act of conflicting desires and feelings".[21] It was also listed as Allen's finest work in a joint article by The Daily Telegraph film critics Robbie Collin and Tim Robey, who compared its structure with the works of Anton Chekhov and lauded it as "perhaps the most perfectly assured braiding of comedy and drama in mainstream American film. It feels like the miraculous sweet spot between all of its filmmaker's many modes and tones – biting without being cruel, profound without seeming sanctimonious, warmly humane without collapsing into goo."[22] It was ranked third among Allen's films in a 2016 poll of Time Out contributors, with editor Joshua Rothkopf singling out the character of Holly as "the kind of desperate, flailing Manhattanite that future director-writers would spin entire careers out of".[23]

Accolades

Michael Caine and Dianne Wiest won Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress for their portrayals of Elliot and Holly, respectively. Hannah and Her Sisters was the last film to win in both supporting acting categories until The Fighter in 2011. The film was also nominated for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration and Best Film Editing.

Allen received the 1986 award for Best Director from the U.S. National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, Dianne Wiest won Best Supporting Actress, and the film was nominated for Best Film.[24]

In France, the film was nominated for a César Award for Best Foreign Film.

Award Category Recipient(s) Result
Academy Awards Best Picture Robert Greenhut Nominated
Best Director Woody Allen Nominated
Best Original Screenplay Won
Best Supporting Actor Michael Caine Won
Best Supporting Actress Dianne Wiest Won
Best Art Direction Stuart Wurtzel, Carol Joffe Nominated
Best Film Editing Susan E. Morse Nominated
BAFTA Awards Best Film Robert Greenhut, Woody Allen Nominated
Best Director Woody Allen Won
Best Original Screenplay Won
Best Actor Nominated
Best Actor Michael Caine Nominated
Best Actress Mia Farrow Nominated
Best Supporting Actress Barbara Hershey Nominated
Best Film Editing Susan E. Morse Nominated
Directors Guild of America Directing – Feature Film Woody Allen Nominated
Golden Globe Awards Best Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical Robert Greenhut Won
Best Director Woody Allen Nominated
Best Screenplay Nominated
Supporting Actor Michael Caine Nominated
Supporting Actress Dianne Wiest Nominated
National Society of Film Critics Best Film Woody Allen Nominated
Best Screenplay Nominated
Best Supporting Actress Barbara Hershey Nominated
Best Supporting Actress Dianne Wiest Won
New York Film Critics Circle Best Film Woody Allen Won
Best Director Won
Best Screenplay Nominated
Best Supporting Actress Dianne Wiest Won
Writers Guild of America Best Original Screenplay Woody Allen Won

Legacy

In 1986, Mad magazine satirized the film as "Henna and Her Sickos" which was written by Debbee Ovitz with art by Mort Drucker.

In 2016, Olivia Wilde directed a live table reading of Hannah and Her Sisters at The New York Times' small and packed-out Times Center theatre.[25] The cast included Wilde as Hannah, Rose Byrne as Lee, Uma Thurman as Holly, Michael Sheen as Elliott, Bobby Cannavale as Mickey, and Salman Rushdie as Frederick with Maya Rudolph, Jason Sudeikis and Justin Long filling out the supporting parts.[26] Questlove served as the musical director who cued the musical selections ranging from jazz renditions of the Great American Songbook to Bach.[26]

Soundtrack

Note: not all of these selections appear on the soundtrack issued by MCA Records.

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