Stars: Meryl Streep, William Hurt, Renee Zellweger, Tom Everett Scott, Nicky Katt, Lauren Graham

Director: Carl Franklin

Summary: An investigative reporter whose sole aim in life is her career is called home to an emergency. Taking time out she leaves New York, her job and her boyfriend and moves in with her parents in Pennsylvania. Still intending to work on her recent story about a US Senator, she finds herself following a more important investigation into her own family life...

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Based on Anna Quindlen's bestselling novel, this is a mother-daughter and father-daughter story, two for the price of one. But director Carl Franklin also tries to inject a police-mystery angle that it neither needs nor will support. Renee Zellweger plays a young writer on the rise, who has finally got her break for a New York magazine. While home for a birthday party for her nearly famous writer father (William Hurt), she learns that her mother (Meryl Streep) has been diagnosed with cancer. Then her father does the unthinkable: he all but commands her to put her career on hold to take care of her mother and nurse her through her illness. Dad, a popular college professor who has never received the literary acclaim he always believed he deserved, essentially checks out--and daughter must play parent to her mother. Strong performances by Streep and Zellweger give this parent-child relationship the heart--and the anger--of the real thing, while Hurt seems slightly disembodied as the self-involved father whose needs have dominated both women. Still, the detective-story aspect (the film is told in flashback, as the cops try to discover whether someone slipped Mom a fatal dose of morphine) is a construct that could have been done without. --Marshall Fine

Aspect Ratio:	1.85 Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	Spotlight On Location, Trailer, Filmographies, Production Notes
Subtitles:	Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish
Year:	1998
Release Date:	July 4, 2005
Runtime:	122 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	8200783
Keywords:	One, True, General, Wide, Screen, Thing, Drama
Genre:	Drama