"One True Thing"
A Film Review by
Linda Lopez McAlister
on "The Women's Show"
WMNF-FM 88.5, Tampa, FL


   A major film opened this week that you'll probably want to see.  It
is "One True Thing" based on Anna Qunidlen's novel with a screenplay by
Karen Croner.  It's a film that contains a lot more than ONE true thing
about contemporary American women -- and men.  It's brimming with the
emotional truth of characters you'll recognize and feel tremendous
empathy with.

     And these characters, the Gulden family--Kate, George, Ellen, and
Brian--are brought to life by some of the most skillful actors on the
screen today: Meryl Streep as Kate Gulden, the consumate wife to a great
man; William Hurt as her husband George the acclaimed professor; Rene
Zellweger as their daughter Ellen who strives to emulate and live up to
the perfectionism of her brilliant father; and Tom Everett Scott, the
younger child who finds the expectations placed on him by his father too
much for him to bear.  Rarely do you encounter such a stellar and
skillful ensemble cast with such insightful material to work with; every
moment has the ring of truth to it.

 I saw Meryl Streep give an interview the other day and she said
what made her pulse race about this script is that it's one of the rare
ones that actually takes motherhood seriously and shows the things that
mothers really do.  Only a film based on a novel and screenplay by women
is likely to find this topic interesting enough to put on the screen, in
my experience.   The mother here is Kate Gulden, a white, middle-class,
educated mother who has raised her two children to adulthood and who
spends her days happily and fully making a home for her famous husband,
creating a social life for them, doing good works with her group of friends
in the small New England college town in which they live.  And
she is a happy woman, no doubt about it; her frequent and infectious
full-bodied laughter tells us that.  She loves her life.

 Ellen, her daughter, who lives in New York as an ambitious young
writer for New York Magazine, scorns her mother's narrow, Martha
Stewartesque world and strives to emulate her father who once wrote for
The New Yorker before he became a famous professor and won the National
Book Award.   When Kate is taken ill with ovarian cancer and George
insists that Ellen reluctantly return home to care for her, Ellen is at
first contemptuous of the housewifely existence her mother, and now she,
is immersed in.  But she learns, gradually, to appreciate and value her
mother's life.  Simultaneously, she begins to find the shadowy spots in
her father's aura of greatness.  She begins to see his narcissism.  In a
telling moment he flatters her by asking her to write the introduction
to his next book and bewilders her by handing her two of his shirts that
need mending--all in the same breath.  She begins to see how he depends
on her mother, how he uses other people and puts his own needs above
all, how he's kind of a blowhard who usees the same tired lines and
stories over and over, how he dallies with his adoring female graduate
students, and, ultimately, how weak, how insecure, how frightened a
person he is.

Ellen begins to reassess her own life.  When she sees traces of her
father's behavior in Jordan, her long-time boyfriend, she sends him
packing.  And she begins to see that it's not just her father (though
he's an extreme case) but the way that all men are socialized that
invites this kind of self-centeredness and expectation of privilege.

 Kate Gulden, "only" a housewife and dying of cancer, turns out to
be by far the wisest and the happiest person in the Gulden family.  Not
because she's blind to the failings of her husband and children, she
knows them better than anyone does, not because she's a dupe, but
because she realizes that there is no such thing as unalloyed good and
she's willing to love what (and whom) she has and be happy with it
rather than always to be dissatisfied and searching for more.

    "One True Thing"  is a lovely and profound film that takes women and
women's lives seriously and has important things to say about them.
Ellen becomes a wiser young feminist as a result of her experiences with
her mother; we will all have something to think about from seeing this

For "The Women's Show" this is Linda Lopez McAlister on women and film.

Copyright 1998 by Linda Lopez McAlister.  All rights reserved.  Please d
not reprint this review without the permission of the author: mcalister@
chuma1.cas.usf.edu  .