One True Thing

A career woman reassesses her parents’ lives after she is forced to care for her cancer-stricken mother.

• Director:Carl Franklin
• Genre:Drama
• Runtime:127 minutes

Cast

Meryl Streep : Kate Gulden
Renée Zellweger: Ellen Gulden
William Hurt : George Gulden
Tom Everett Scott : Brian Gulden

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. Read more

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