One True Thing Review
by "Wallace Baine" (wbaine AT cruzio DOT com)October 1st, 1998
"One True Thing" a stirring family drama
by Wallace Baine
Santa Cruz Sentinel
“I want to talk before I die,” blurts Kate Gulden (Meryl Streep) towards the end of “One True Thing.” Kate is in the final throes of terminal illness and with her ghoulish red eyes and oatmeal-colored complexion, she looks the part. Then, as her horrified daughter looks on, she does something unexpected: with mock petulance, she admits she doesn’t know what to say.
That comic hiccup in the middle of what should have been the inevitable death-bed speechifying is only one of the moments when “One True Thing” distinguishes itself from the ritualistic hanky movies that you might see on Lifetime.
Based on Anna Quindlen’s novel of the same name, “One True Thing” is a convincing but restrained melodrama, at times attaining true emotional power. Director Carl Franklin (“Devil in a Blue Dress”) and screenwriter Karen Croner (“Gas, Food, Lodging”) don’t always hit the buttons they set out to hit. But they also keep the film from flying off into hysterics. The most effective images are the most simple ones: A scene in which Kate, ravaged by cancer, stands unsteadily in the town square among dozens of Christmas-time revelers singing “Silent Night,” is certainly nothing original. But its grace is undeniable.
Ultimately, “One True Thing” is about a young adult confronting the mystery of her parents’ relationships with her and each other. Ellen (Renee Zellweger) is a driven New York magazine writer who, like most people her age, thinks she knows her parents all too well.
When she visits her leafy, upstate hometown for her dad’s surprise birthday party, her parents are playing true to form. Her mom Kate is a kind of pre-feminist uber-housewife, chirpy, annoyingly sunny, super-attentive to the trivial elements of her family’s happiness while, at least in Ellen’s eyes, blind to the larger undercurrents of unhappiness. When we first see Kate, she’s ridiculously dressed as Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz (the party is one of those come-dressed-as-your-favorite-literary-character deals) and her costume seems a fitting metaphor for her personality. To say the least, Ellen who prefers basic black has certain compatability issues with her mother. When the two exchange hugs at the party, Ellen cannot hide her distaste.
Her father is a different matter. George Gulden (William Hurt) is a National Book Award winner and head of the English department at the local college. He’s brilliant, headstrong and impatient with mediocrity and Ellen has adored him since she was a child.
These perceptions begin to change, however, when George asks Ellen to move back home to take care of her mother who has just been diagnosed with cancer. Ellen is horrified at the idea but she does it anyway. When Ellen is drafted into her mother’s stultifying social club, a collection of preening upper-middle-class hens consumed with make-busy projects, Ellen feels lost: “The one thing I never wanted to do,” she confides to a friend, “is to live my mother’s life.”
Surprisingly, Ellen’s relationship with her mother eventually becomes secondary to her relationship with her father. In Ellen’s eyes, George moves from literary god to arrogant alpha male to philandering, ego-besotted monster. Taking care of her mom eventually costs Ellen everything she holds dear: her job, her boyfriend, her golden image of her brilliant father. In the end, Kate rushes in to fill the vacuum in her daughter’s life.
As for the acting? Expectations are high when Meryl Streep plays a dying mother and, of course, she’s incredibly great. What’s notable, however, is that Streep doesn’t outshine her co-stars. Hurt and Zellweger adopt similar acting styles: a turbulent, but barely perceptible anguish that rarely spills out into over emotionalism. We’re talking about a white, middle-class family with two Harvard diplomas in the household. The absence of screaming jags and trailer-trash revelations that explain away all the family’s pathology gives “One True Thing” a refreshing dignity.
At one point, Kate trying to drink in the feel of the air and the small sensations of life contradicts her husband’s writing-coach philosophy “Less is more.” No, she tells a daughter in the glow of a newfound respect, “More is more.”
As a life philosophy, fine. But as a way to make a film about humanizing an idealized family, George was right after all. Less is more.
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