In Hollywood, the prevailing wisdom is that women's pictures don't belong on the big screen. 'One True Thing,' with its insights into relationships and its emphasis on old-fashioned values, is the kind of film that is increasingly relegated to TV. Streep, in an honest, unaffected performance, and Zellweger, outstanding in her central role, are so compelling in their conflict and so luminous in their subsequent reconciliation that even the blandest of domestic scenes gain dramatic heft. And after wearing Kate's apron for a time, she is awed and humbled by all that her mother has accomplished in what was a wonderful life. Gradually, she realizes that her father is hardly the great and good man she believed him to be, nor is Kate merely a chipper, cookie-baking nitwit. 'The one thing I never wanted to do was live my mother's life,' she observes, 'and here I am living it.'

Then, Ellen is forced to confront her greatest fear. Absorbed in her baking, her gardening and her crafts, Kate is the last of the happy homemakers.Įllen's contempt for her mother is undisguised, but Kate is too loving to chide her daughter or complain. It's nothing at all like Ellen's sun-dappled childhood memories.Īs Daddy's little girl, Ellen has always idolized her father, George (William Hurt), a self-absorbed professor of literature who is the antithesis of her mother, a cheery faculty wife tirelessly devoted to her family, friends and community. Ellen's testimony introduces a series of flashbacks that gradually form an intricate Gulden family album. The film opens at an inquiry into Kate's death, which the district attorney suspects may have been a mercy killing. And with few exceptions, he and screenwriter Karen Croner ('Cold Sassy Tree') approach the story with humor, sensitivity and restraint rather than easy sentiment.

Though rife with potential for cloying sentimentality, the movie works because director Carl Franklin ('Devil in a Blue Dress') is not one to tug on the heartstrings. It takes another 20 years, sometimes more, to realize that Mom and Dad are childhood illusions, too.Įllen Gulden (Renee Zellweger), a zealous magazine reporter, makes that unnerving discovery in 'One True Thing,' an uplifting, superbly acted and intelligent family drama about how little we know about those who love us best.ĭrawn from Anna Quindlen's 1995 novel, the moving story centers on Ellen's return to her picket-fence home town over the holidays to care for her cancer-stricken mother, Kate (Meryl Streep). By the time they're 7, most kids recognize these wondrous beings for who they really are: Dad in a beard or Mom tiptoeing through the night. Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy. No sob sisters: Meryl Streep and Renee Zellweger, quietly earning tears from moviegoers.

One true thing by anna quindlen