Carl Franklin's screen version of the Anna Quindlen novel -- careerist feminist daughter obliged to move back home to nurse her happy-housewife mother through the final stages of cancer -- does not escape the TV-movie-disease-of-the-week syndrome. Neither does it escape a certain schematicism in its treatment of women's issues, mother versus daughter, family versus career, love versus sex. The old-fashioned homemaker and community do-gooder never seems a credible mate for the pretentious my-career-is-more-important-than-your-career college Lit. professor, with his ready anecdotes of Steinbeck and Schiller, his unattributed quotation from Thurber, his reminiscences of life at The New Yorker, his unfinished Great American Novel. And the daughter's klutz-in-the-kitchen scene is as old as Katharine Hepburn. And any illusion of real life as distinct from pure baloney cannot survive the moment when the dying woman, too ill to go out to dinner, sees the dinner come home to her, complete with penguin-suited waiters, white tablecloth, floral centerpiece, and strolling violinist essaying the solo line from Scheherazade. The mystery element -- suicide or assisted suicide, and if assisted, by whom? -- never stirs much interest, but at least it avoids the social-issue-of-the-week syndrome. Meryl Streep, while she has no identifiable new accent to try out, talks at times with a pain-medication slur, loses her hair, delivers a Big Speech, and litters the margins with her usual quota of graceful doodles. The movie really belongs, though, to Renee Zellweger, who reveals a fine sense of rhythm and interplay, a mastery of the double take and the slow burn, a vivid inner life. In her highest-profile role since Jerry Maguire, she betrays a temptation, or maybe obligation, to go cutie-pie on us, but the drift of the plot helps keep her in line. William Hurt, Tom Everett Scott. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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