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Review by Susan Granger
3½ stars out of 4
With all that has been written about the feminist movement, it
took Pulitzer Prize-winning Anna Quindlen to write an engrossing story
that dramatizes the complex difference between our mother's generation
and us, a confrontation between a woman whose expectations never
extended beyond her home and her children and her husband's career,
who viewed her life as an adjunct to those things, and her daughter,
whom she raised not only to work but to expect the world. Renee
Zellweger ("Jerry Maguire") plays an ambitious Manhattan journalist
who is forced to move back home to help her middle-aged parents -
Meryl Streep and William Hurt - through a cancer crisis. Not only does
she discover who her parents really are - their strengths, their
weaknesses - but the gutsy, gritty emotional journey she undertakes as
a care-giver is a complicated rite-of-passage to her own
maturity. Superbly adapted for the screen by Karen Croner and directed
by Carl Franklin ("Devil in a Blue Dress"), the performances are
dazzling, except for Tom E. Scott's bland younger brother character
which is grossly underwritten. Renee Zellweger, in particular, is
captivating; she is irresistible as an actress, while Meryl Streep is
luminous, perceptive, and courageous. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1
to 10, "One True Thing" is a wise, resolute 8. It's a remarkable,
intimate film that reverberates with love for an unbroken generation
of stay-at-home mothers who knew how to have fun within a limited
arena and to love the life they made for themselves.
Copyright © 2000 Susan Granger
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