ONE TRUE THING 1999
A film review by Timothy Voon
Copyright 1999 Timothy Voon
3 out of 5 for tragedy in the family
Cast: Meryl Streep, Renee Zellweger, William Hurt. Screenplay: Karen Croner, based on the novel by Anna Quindlen. Producers: Harry Ufland and Jesse Burton. Director: Carl Franklin.
This movie should have a profound effect on people's understanding of life and death, but somehow ends up being less effective than it could have been, because it diverts its attention away from a mother's need and focuses instead on a daughter's plight.
In this pandemonium of personal and family problems, we learn more than we need to know about poor family dynamics. We have a mother (Meryl Streep) who has given her life over to serving her family and helping her husband achieve his dreams. A father (William Hurt) who is on the surface an accomplished professor, but beneath the smooth exterior lacks any character strength. A daughter (Renee Zellweger) and a son who are constantly living in the shadow of their ‘great' father, and who are unable live up to his high expectations for them.
It becomes apparent how important the role of the mother is to this family, when she starts dying. The fabric that holds them all together slowly begins to tear. Her husband is unable to cope with the situation and unfairly unloads his responsibilities on a daughter, who is only beginning to realise how great her mother is. Unfortunately, too much time is spent exploring the daughter's dilemma of caring for her sick mother, and not enough time is spent exploring the fears of the one who is dying of cancer.
The other issue that is brought out in this movie is the need for cancer sufferers to die with dignity. It is rather unfortunate that this movie paints the picture of someone asking for euthanasia because of inadequate pain control. I believe this is a biased, incorrect view of cancer sufferers. With current medical treatments, suicide because of inadequate pain control is not a valid option. However, the deterioration of quality of life is a more difficult issue to address and in this case, may have tipped the scales of life and death.
Timothy Voon
e-mail: stirling@netlink.com.au
Movie Archives http://us.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Tim+Voon
Movies In Melbourne
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~pfowler/week/movies.html
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews