One True Thing is a 1998 American drama film directed by Carl Franklin. It tells the story of a woman who is forced to put her life on hold in order to care for her mother who is dying of cancer. It was adapted by Karen Croner from the novel by Anna Quindlen. It was directed by Carl Franklin. The movie stars Meryl Streep, Renée Zellweger, William Hurt, Tom Everett Scott, Lauren Graham and Nicky Katt. Bette Midler sings the lead song, "My One True Friend", over the end credits. The track was first released on Midler's 1998 album Bathhouse Betty.
Storyline
The principal character, Ellen Gulden, goes through an inner and outer struggle that threatens her whole world as she has to leave her job in New York and come home to take care of her ailing mother. Gulden is very close to her father, a celebrated novelist and college professor. Ellen has become the golden girl, went to Harvard and has a high pressure job writing for a New York newspaper. She is fierce when another writer tries to take her story from her and later we see her alone in a dark office space at a table dumping packets of an herbal powder into a cup and pouring in cola and saying to herself "I'm not tired, I'm not tired…."
The next scene shows Ellen in her apartment leaning against a wall as her boyfriend tries to cajole her into letting him in. Evidently, he has been unfaithful. Then she is seen going home on a train with a friend, to attend a surprise birthday party for her father. Ellen and her friend, both sans costumes and dressed in sophisticated city black, exchange glances and as Ellen goes into the living room a neighbor named Mrs. Best, dressed as Snow White, asks her who she came as. Ellen replies, "Lizzie Borden … who gave her mother forty whacks."
It is obvious that Ellen identifies with her father and has barely restrained disdain for her mother and her mother's life. She looks confused and uncomfortable anytime she witnesses her father and her mother being affectionate and romantic, and she looks somewhat lost, throughout the movie. At the party, there is wine and other alcoholic beverages being consumed by everyone in a natural manner. George Gulden looks like he has had several when he and Ellen sneak out into the side yard. She asked him what he thought of her last article. He tells her that her piece was too emotional and that he once spent a whole day working on one sentence. He knows it was her best work to date and then blames her editor.
When it is discovered that Kate Gulden has cancer, George tells Ellen she is going to come home and take care of her mother. Ellen is appalled that her dad would actually demand this of her, knowing it could jeopardize her career and asks him to take a sabbatical or get a housekeeper. George says she can freelance from home and guilt-trips her into agreeing to do it. After she does come back home with her stuff, she talks with her father in his den and he asks her to write the introduction to one of his anthologies. She is pleased with this privilege until he gives her a pile of books to read to prepare for it and gives her his shirts to wash and mend.
Ellen has to start helping her mother with domestic chores and cooking while her father goes about his business like nothing is wrong. Ellen starts having flashbacks of her childhood and how she brushed aside her mother and idealized her father. She also remembers when she first discovered that her father was cheating on her mother with his female students.
She is horrified when her mother's club, the "Minnie's," make her an honorary member after she makes them lunch. She tries valiantly despite many interruptions to complete her story on a junior politician who was caught doing cocaine but has a crisis of conscience when she tricks him into giving her a ride to the airport. He starts talking about the downward spiral his life took and how he regrets what it did to his family. He says he knows now that his family's love is what is important. Ellen seems to have an epiphany about her own mother. She goes home and calls her editor and tells him that she missed the senator.
After a thanksgiving meal that Ellen cooked, and her father brought home some colleagues to dinner after they had all agreed that it would be just a family holiday, Ellen is filled with anger and frustration at her father. She and her boyfriend Jordan, and her brother go out to a bar. Ellen gets drunk and starts yelling when Jordan starts defending her father and is also making eyes at another girl at the bar. She ends up at home helping herself to some pain reliever and Jordan is on his way back to New York. Her mother asks her if she is alright and she asks her mother how she had done it all those years, all the work taking care of the house without no one seeming to notice. Her mother thinks it is time Ellen went back to her job and her life in New York; she says she can hire someone to help her.
Kate calls Ellen into the room and she is looking very fragile from her illness. Kate confronts Ellen about her anger at her father, and Ellen tells her she can't talk about it with her. Kate tells her she is tired of being quieted; she needs to talk about the inevitable. Kate also tells Ellen there is nothing about her father that she doesn't know, and know and understand better. She says women think they won't put up with something, but after "you've slept with a man for thousand nights, and you smell like milk and your body's gotten a little soft … you wake up and the kids have gotten themselves dressed for the first time …", making the father leave would be like cutting his face out of all the pictures and just leave "a big hole there."
When Kate asks Ellen to look for her father and bring him home, Ellen finds him alone in a bar. She realizes that her father's philandering days have become lonely nights of drinking at a local bar to numb the pain of his life and talent slipping away. He admits to Ellen that the reason he loved Kate was that she was full of light shining through everything, and he couldn't bear the thought of her light slipping away.
As her mother is dying, Ellen tells her she loves her and Kate said she knew it, she'd always known it. At the funeral, Jordan shows up and asks Ellen how she is doing. Ellen, referring to her mother, says "I never thought I'd miss someone so much," and Jordan says, "I know, I missed you too, baby." Ellen tells him she just don't think he gets it, and walks away. When Ellen comes home, she is cleaning the kitchen when she notices the morphine pill bottle in the trash. She goes back to New York without seeing her father again.
After she has come back to Langhorne to answer a D.A.'s questions about the events leading up to her mother's death (her mother was found to have actually died of a morphine overdose) she goes and starts planting flowers on her mother's grave. She has a new job as a features writer at the Village Voice, she had told the D.A., and she is dressed in earth tones instead of her customary black. Her father comes up and tells her he thinks she was very brave to do what she did, and she looks puzzled until she realizes George thinks she killed her mother. Then they both realized she must have taken her own life.
George tells Ellen that he loved Kate, considering her his muse, his "one true thing." Ellen seems to realize that her mother was her one true thing, also. They both plant the flowers together. Ellen is on her way to being whole, she has accepted her mother, herself, and is forgiving and accepting that her father is fallible. In the final scene, George and Ellen are planting daffodil bulbs on Kate's grave.
Cast
Accolades
Streep was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in the film, and her performance drew reviews from numerous critics, notably Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle, who declared, "After 'One True Thing', critics who persist in the fiction that Streep is a cold and technical actress will need to get their heads examined. She is so instinctive and natural - so thoroughly in the moment and operating on flights on inspiration - that she's able to give us a woman who's at once wildly idiosyncratic and utterly believable." Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan noted that Streep's role "is one of the least self-consciously dramatic and surface showy of her career, but Streep adds a level of honesty and reality that makes [her performance] one of her most moving."
External links
