True Grace

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Kate Gulden (Meryl Streep) is the kind of woman who gives surprise costume parties for her husband's birthday, is worried about her careerist daughter's lack of culinary skills and spends far too much time with like-minded ladies making sure the town Christmas trees are suitably decorated. She is, in short, the kind of person no one, including her loved ones, takes very seriously--until she begins dying before her time.

One True Thing, a patient, unforced adaptation of Anna Quindlen's novel by screenwriter Karen Croner and director Carl Franklin, contains lots of true things about that process. For it immerses us in the awful, vertiginous panic that attends a death in the family--the fierce-wistful attempts to maintain routines in the face of this most exigent of interruptions; the desire to speak certain truths before it's too late and the fear of what consequences such candor might have; the politesse with which you must cover the outrage you feel as the rest of the world glides on about its business while an important part of yours is painfully, poignantly shutting down.

As she succumbs to illness, Kate must take on the final duty of a dutiful life--mediating some kind of truce between her husband George, walled off from reality by his professorial abstractions and his huge but fragile ego (a perfect role for William Hurt, that most self-regarding of actors), and her daughter Ellen, forced to give up an all consuming career to nurse her mother (Renee Zellweger, in a wonderfully clenched performance). This reconciliation Streep encourages in the subtlest of ways. There's no apology for Kate's lifetime of good cheer and common sense, just an opening up of those modest qualities, so that her family and we are gently, unsentimentally embraced and enlightened by their grace and bravery.

--R.S.