亲情无价

No matter how well we eventually come to understand our parents, our deepest feelings about them are formed at a time when we are young and have incomplete information. “One True Thing” is about a daughter who grows up admiring her father and harboring doubts about her mother, and finds out she doesn't know as much about either one as she thinks she does.
The movie is based on the 1995 novel by Anna Quindlen about a New York magazine writer whose father is “Mr. American Literature” and whose mother seems to have been shaped by the same forces that generated Martha Stewart's hallucinations. Ellen (Renee Zellweger) is bright and pretty but with a subtle wounded look: She has that way of signaling that she's been hurt and expects to be hurt again.
She comes home to upstate New York for a surprise birthday party for her father, a professor named George (William Hurt), and is not surprised to see her mother, Kate (Meryl Streep), prancing around the house dressed like Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz.” Yes, it's a costume party, but Kate is the kind of woman who can find costumes like that right in her own closet. Eventually Ellen gets a chance to ask her dad about her latest magazine article, which he has read and, “writer to writer,” thinks should be “more muscular.” Later he muses, “When I was 20 and working at the New Yorker, I would spend a whole day working on a single sentence.” That's the kind of statement that deserves pity rather than respect; if it is true, then to meet his deadlines he must have had to dash off his other sentences in heedless haste. Ellen should be able to feel a certain contempt for her father for even using such a ploy, but she is blinded by his tweeds, his National Book Award, his seminars, his whole edifice of importance. He thinks he's a big shot, and she buys it.
Ellen's hurt, we see, comes because her father, whom she admires, does not sufficiently show his love for her--while her mother, of whom she disapproves, has a love that is therefore unwelcome. All of this begins to matter in the next months, as it develops that Kate has cancer, and George wants his daughter to move back home and take care of her.
But ... I have a career, Ellen argues. “You can work as a free-lancer from home,” the professor says, clearly not convinced that whatever his daughter has can be described as a career. He, of course, is too busy with midterms to take care of Kate. The family's younger brother, Brian (Tom Everett Scott), must stay in school. Yes, a nurse could be hired, but the professor doesn't want a nurse poking around the house and disturbing his routine. Kate herself doesn't want Ellen to stay, but wasn't consulted (by her husband or her daughter) about the decision.
As autumn winds down into winter, Ellen coexists in the house with a mother who is clearly demented in the area of domestic activities. She belongs to a local group named the Minnies, who decorate Christmas trees with the fury of beavers rebuilding a dam. The luncheon meetings of the Minnies could be photographed for layouts in food magazines, and of course the Minnies cook everything themselves. When Ellen breaks a piece of Kate's china, Kate asks her to save the pieces because she can use them in her mosaic table. Ellen finally tells Kate she thinks the Minnies are like a cult group.
George, on the other hand, throws his daughter a bone; he asks her to write an introduction to his collected essays. She is flattered, although a little wounded that he then immediately asks her, in more or less the same spirit, to launder some shirts.
As winter unfolds and Kate's illness grows more severe, Ellen begins to suspect things about her father, and her mother observes this and finally tells her: “There's nothing that you know about your father that I don't know--and better.” And we see that the buried story of the movie is the hurt Kate has borne all these years over the way her daughter's love was quietly directed away from her.
It is the craftsmanship that elevates “One True Thing” above the level of a soaper. The director, Carl Franklin (“One False Move”), goes not for big melodramatic revelations but for the accumulation of emotional investments. Hurt and Streep are so well cast they're able to overcome the generic natures of their roles and make them particular people. And Renee Zellweger, as Streep observed at the Telluride Film Festival, is able to create a place for herself and work inside it, not acting so much as fiercely possessing her character. The movie's lesson is that we go through life telling ourselves a story about our childhood and our parents, but we are the authors of that story, and it is less fact than fiction.

    这是一部家庭片，剧情并无太多新意。小镇上温馨的家、在大学当文学系主任的父亲、一心一意操持家务的母亲、在外读书工作的儿女。女儿从小崇拜父亲，因观念差异与母亲一直不太亲密。在母亲得了癌症后，她搁下工作，勉强回到小镇，操持起母亲原本操持的家务，参加母亲与邻居太太们的俱乐部，又目睹了父亲对家庭责任的不作为以及对母亲的不忠，她终于认识到原来父母并不是她从小以为的那种人，原来母亲比她想象的坚强和聪慧得多。父亲一直是她的榜样，当他的完美形象崩塌后，她似乎有些迷失了。让我记忆深刻的一个场景是，她去采访某个闹出吸毒丑闻的政客，政客诉说自己的感受：不知何时不知何地，突然发现人生已经一团糟，想要勇往直前，去发现迷失了自己，现在只想好好弥补家人。她很有触动的说是，因为家人才是最爱自己的人。接着她回想起童年时坐在汽车后排，看着母亲坐在前排灵巧的织着毛衣，微笑的望着女儿，金色的头发轻轻晃动。于是她打电话给主编留言，慌称根本没等到政客。这么做，不仅几个月的准备工作前功尽弃，也直接丢了记者工作。但我认为，她是不会后悔的，正是政客的一番话使她感同身受，终于体会到了母亲对儿女深深的母爱，觉察到自己对母亲感情上的疏离。这种对家庭、亲情、自我完全不同的新感悟，使她明白相比做一个成功的记者，眼前所拥有的一切更加值得珍惜。整部影片没有非常煽情的桥段，平实但不平淡，结尾也不落俗套，是一部值得回味的家庭片。