Hannah Free

Directed by Wendy Jo Carlton
Wolfe Video



If LOGO and the Hallmark Channel had a baby, they would name her Hannah Free.

The story goes like this: an aging lesbian couple, together for four decades, both now find themselves confined to the same nursing home, but unable to see one another. Free-spirited butch Hannah (Sharon Gless) is paralyzed after falling off a roof, and is denied access to her comatose lover Rachel (Maureen Gallagher) by Rachel's bitter born-again Christian daughter Marge (Taylor Miller of TV's All My Children).

Bedridden and lonely, Hannah spends most of her time napping, journaling, reading mail, and talking to an imagined younger version of Rachel (Ann Hagemann). It is through these (highly contrived) plot devices that the audience is taken back into chapters of Hannah's history: her childhood chasing after little blond Rachel through wheat fields, her Depression-era youth happily roughing it in Alaska, her WWII military service as a pilot in the Women's Army Corps. Her younger version is played by relative unknown Kelli Strickland, who spends the majority of her onscreen time locked in tepid PG-13 sex scenes with Hagemann's Rachel.

One day, following a tense interaction with Marge, a young woman named Greta (Jacqui Jackson) wanders into Hannah's room, all wide eyed and with polite questions. She draws out from Hannah her unfortunate circumstances, and quickly offers to come by at 3 a.m. to take Hannah to see Rachel. We soon learn that Greta is not just motivated by altruism; she is Rachel's great-granddaughter, and herself a lesbian. Hannah and Greta strike up a friendship, and Hannah later shares her journals with Greta; more flashbacks ensue. The third act sees Hannah, Marge, and Greta come together to make a very difficult end-of-life decision on behalf of the woman they all hold dear.

Notice my usage of the term third act? It's a common term in references to films, but it is especially appropriate in the case of Hannah Free, a film adapted for the screen by playwright Claudia Allen. Film buffs are aware that play adaptations fall into two distinct categories: those that successfully make the leap from stage to screen (e.g., Crimes of the Heart and Steel Magnolias) and those that don't. Sadly, Hannah Free just doesn't.

I appreciate issues-driven cinema as much as the next bleeding heart liberal. Admittedly, Hannah Free does address a variety of pertinent topics. These include the concepts of a loving versus “legal” family in regard to LGBT relationships and which decisions each partner is allowed to make regarding the other; the general dearth of quality elder care, specifically care for aging LGBT folks; and living openly in rural communities. With its story told by a predominantly female cast, and emphasis placed on both respect for lesbian elders and multi-generational lesbian representation in families with the character of Greta, the film also has a decidedly feminist bent. Still, Hannah Free is heavy-handed—and hokey.

As it relates to issues of health, family, and LGBT equality, Hannah Free is a relevant film. As a worthwhile cinematic experience, however, it falls woefully short.

Review by M. Brianna Stallings

Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America

By Evelyn Nakano Glenn
Harvard University Press

Evelyn Nakano Glenn is a professor of Women’s and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Berkeley and author of Forced to Care. Perhaps because of her vocation, the book has a bit of a textbook flavor to it, but as it progresses, she lets go and begins to fill it out with a more humanistic view.

Forced to Care begins with a look at those who are responsible for the lion’s share of caregiving in America. Glenn’s findings basically confirm what most of us know already: in most cases, women of color, women at the low end of the socioeconomic scale, and illegal immigrants are the ones caring for our nation’s young, disabled, and elderly.

The author then takes her inquiries one step further by tracing the roots of caregiving back to colonial America in an effort to discover why such a disproportionate amount of paid and unpaid caretaking falls to these individuals. Glenn does a terrific job of leading the reader through the individual events that occurred politically, socially, industrially, and economically to reinforce the notion that it is a woman’s duty to take care of needy family members. Following the shift from an agricultural, self-sustaining, family-based society to a market economy, Glenn shows just why gender divisions still remain with respect to these types of jobs. She illustrates, through the use of an amazing amount of research, just exactly how American women with very few other choices have been coerced into providing care for others to the detriment of their own needs for centuries. Our society’s continued devaluation of these kinds of “homemaking” services serves to perpetuate the problem.

It is clear that the author encourages a sea change with respect to both paid and unpaid caregiving, but she refrains from demonizing any particular groups or individuals, instead offering a clear, concise look at how we got ourselves here, and why we need to get out of this mess while we still can.

Glenn advocates for both care providers and those receiving care and uses her vast knowledge of the history and foundation of the problems to offer concrete solutions to the difficulties both face as our aging society pushes us closer to a crisis in the fastest growing segment of healthcare in America.

Before picking up this book, I was nearly certain that I would be called upon to care for elderly family members at some point in my life, although hopefully not until my children are grown and gone. Despite my fears of being able to do so with grace and love versus resentment and frustration, it was nonetheless something I didn’t see a way out of. I can’t say that Forced to Care allayed my fears in any way, but I gained a tremendous amount of insight as to how and why I might be called upon to provide such care and how, if I am so inclined, I might join in efforts to increase the availability of resources and respect for caregivers as a whole.

While the book is not an easy read—I didn't settle down with it in my lounge chair next to the pool—it is an absolutely eye-opening look at something many of us take for granted; that we as women will eventually be called upon to care for those family members who cannot do it for themselves.

Review by Kari O’Driscoll

The Love Ceiling

By Jean Davies Okimoto
Endicott & Hugh Books

As I started to write the review for this book, I realized that this is one of two books I have recently read about artists, more specifically painters—The Danish Girl being the other book that centered on artists/painters. I found the story of The Love Ceiling intriguing because the protagonist is a sixty-four-year-old wife, mother, and daughter of a famous artist father and long suffering Japanese-American mother who has recently passed away from cancer. Like many women of the so-called sandwich generation, Anne Kuroda Duppstadt has finally given herself permission to pursue her passion—that of becoming a painter—when she finds herself once again tending to the needs of her family: her thirty-two-year-old daughter moves home after discovering that her partner, Richard, has been cheating on her with a colleague at the hospital where he’s a resident, and Anne’s husband is not handling his impending retirement well and struggles with bouts of depression. This leads her to reach the conclusion at a certain point in the novel that “there is a glass ceiling for women... and it’s made out of the people we love.” Amidst all of this, Anne finally finds the courage to stand up to her domineering father, a man who demands center stage at all times and told her many years ago that she didn’t have what it takes to be a real artist.

I’m not sure why this is the case, but I rarely have the opportunity to read a book that features a sixty-four-year-old protagonist. Being a forty-something single woman, I wasn’t sure I would relate to this character, but I found myself immediately drawn into her feistiness, sense of humor, and honesty that is revealed as the reader progresses through the novel. I also enjoyed the author’s description of the natural beauty of the surroundings through the eyes of an artist (Anne is a gifted landscape artist). Painting with words came to my mind as I was reading this book.

I also had to admit to myself that I made the mistake of assuming that the internal life of a sixty-four-year-old wouldn’t be as interesting a read as that of a younger person, but that was definitely not the case. I found myself inspired by Anne’s character as well as that of an older female artist she meets at an artists’ workshop that she enrolls in to reclaim her dream of being an artist. In that sense, reading this book was also an educational experience for me because it challenged my assumptions about what it is to be an older woman in our society—that no matter how old you are, you can still be a vibrant, active participant in life.

My only criticism of the book is that one scene involving dialogue between Anne’s daughter and a friend in a coffee shop stood out as somewhat superfluous and unnecessary to the story line. Other than that, I found The Love Ceiling to be an excellent read. The book made me realize that sometimes it may take a lifetime to confront the demons of our past, but if life is a journey, it’s not how long it takes you to reach these epiphanies, but what you learn along with way.

Review by Gita Tewari

29: A Novel

By Adena Halpern
Touchstone

If there is one book that will certainly be made into a successful film, it is this one. All the ingredients are there for an entertaining feature-length romp. The plot is quite simple: a seventy-five year old grandmother celebrates her birthday and, while blowing out her candles, makes a seemingly unattainable wish, to be twenty-nine again. Through the magic of Adena Halpern’s imagination, that is exactly what happens the next morning, with the ensuing hilarity and zany situations–including some saucy details!–which make this day-long trek through Ellie Jerome’s “new” life quite an exciting one.

The “flashback/forward to your own life” cinematographic genre is not a new one, and many films (that I admittedly have not seen) have capitalized on this popularity, such as 17 Again with teen heartthrob Zac Efron and 13 Going on 30, starring Jennifer Garner. Like Halpern’s book, this type of movie capitalizes on the public’s regrets and fantasies about our own lives. Who hasn’t had one of those “what if” moments or wished they could opt out of a difficult situation? Ellie, the main character of Halpern’s novel, upon seeing her granddaughter Lucy at her party, wants to live her life differently than she had: marrying young, a man with whom she does not think she was really in love, and always doing what was expected of her as a lady. And, for those of you who will read the book, or see the film version, I will not give away the ending or moral of the story (of course, it contains one!).

Amidst the book’s seeming superficiality and overt sentimentality, there lies a very real social phenomenon. As our elderly population grows and lives longer, how are older women reacting to the societal changes going on around them? How do they reconcile their lived experience with that of their descendants? Given her young age, Halpern manages to convey realistically the mental state of the “granny” figures in the book and their relations to the younger women and men. She also skilfully paints the granny-granddaughter relationship and promotes inter-generational connections and understanding amongst women.

A former columnist for Marie Claire magazine, Halpern has previously authored two books, the fashion memoir Target Underwear and a Vera Wang Gown and the novel The Ten Best Days of My Life. She also holds a Masters degree in screenwriting, a fact that shines through in this new novel. A film version cannot be far behind. My bets are on actresses Glenn Close and Amanda Seyfried to play the aged Ellie and the younger Ellie. Bets are now on!

Review by Sophie M. Lavoie

Face It: What Women Really Feel as Their Looks Change

By Vivian Diller and Jill Muir-Sukenick
Hay House

As the authors of Face It explain in the preface to their book, women who came of age during and after feminism's second wave were brought up to believe our looks don’t have to define who we are or determine our possibilities. What mattered more in this 'enlightened' new age were our brains, our talents, our degrees, our abilities, and our ambition. The paradox is that women continue to receive conflicting messages from the media and our culture about the role appearance plays in our lives. Because many of us have never attempted to unravel our ambivalent feelings about our appearance, the way it impacts our self-esteem, and how we relate to our family and friends, we deny these feelings when we see the first signs of aging—or react with a vengeance to try to arrest the aging process.

Face It is all about guiding women through this potentially treacherous time, during which many of us feel the very ground shifting beneath us. Like many adolescent girls, aging women cling to what the authors describe as “masks” that take the form of "workaholism," addiction to cosmetic surgery, excessive exercise, and dieting to protect ourselves from the sadness and loss we feel at the change in our appearance. In this thoughtful and engaging book, the authors, both psychotherapists and former models, present the stories of how different women approached the aging process. Runway models, nurses, homemakers, and businesswomen, who range in age from early thirties to mid-sixties, tell us their stories.

Some women never felt their appearance played much of a role in their lives, and were taken by surprise when they felt a sense of loss, or even panic, about their changing looks. In contrast, the models interviewed for the book were aware of aging, given that it pushes them out of their profession at the youthful age of twenty-five, and experienced a range of feelings and emotions similar to what many women face when they enter midlife. For women who believed that their intelligence and ambition were their ticket to success, it was often embarrassing to admit to friends and family how their changing looks were impacting them, because it seemed frivolous or superficial.

The authors use the experiences of these different women successfully navigating this challenging time with the use of an innovative six-step program that forms a pathway to a new acceptance and understanding of the aging process. This program involves taking an honest inventory of one's experiences with beauty and acknowledging how family and culture shapes one's identity as a woman. While the authors stress that they aren’t against using plastic surgery to enhance one's appearance, they want to give women the tools to make decisions about it from a place of strength and appreciation for their unique attributes, not out of a panic to "stay in the game."

As a forty-something woman, I found this book intriguing and was pleased to discover that it lived up to its billing of helping women navigate such a challenging time in our lives. Face It helps women of any age to gain an understanding of how to fully own the aging process and not react out of fear to our changing looks and bodies, but to, instead, appreciate and learn from the journey.

Review by Gita Tewari

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg

By Dubravka Ugresic
Canongate

When she sleeps, her nose scrapes the ceiling of her small cottage. Her breasts hang from a pole over the fireplace, and she has a leg made of iron. She lives alone in a hut on chicken legs, and her gates are topped with human skulls. Passing heroes can flatter her and order her to do their bidding, but heroines must serve her in order to win her favor. Baba Yaga, a complicated crone from Central and Eastern European mythology, is a theme explored and exploded in Dubravka Ugresic's Baba Yaga Laid an Egg.

The novel has three parts, all set in Central and Eastern Europe. In the first, a woman deals with her aging mother's increasing senility and travels to their hometown in search of memory and meaning. In the second, three old women visit a health resort to relax and rejuvenate; romance and death follow. The final part is a meta-level, scholarly treatise of Baba Yaga written written from the perspective of a minor character in the first story and as though a folklorist had teased out all the feminine symbols woven throughout the previous two stories.

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is an exploration of women growing older in a post-Soviet state where distance between people is becoming the norm. Like Baba Yaga, the older women in these stories are dealing with their aging bodies, are often alone or isolated, and are frequently misunderstood, though they help or hinder other characters as they please. While these women are marginalized, they are definitely not powerless. They have the power to transform lives, and this is usually done through wealth they've accumulated during their younger years.

At its core, this is a book about women, bodies, and journeys. While Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is a thicket of fairytale symbols and references to life in the former Soviet bloc, it can be enjoyed by those who don't have a prior interest in either fairytales or the locale. Ugresic is a clever writer who shows in this book that imaginary lands are dangerous places and little old ladies aren't as toothless as they may appear.

Review by Catherine Nicotera