最爱是谁

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.

 
 
 


    在我看完这部片子的时候，母亲一期化疗已结束，此时癌已大大改变了母亲，说话变的无力、饮食也没了食欲，不变的是下午只要条件许可的话依然会找几个麻友小聚。

    影片中艾伦从在一个小镇的大学城里长大，作为哈佛优秀毕业生，她在纽约找到了一份不错的工作，生活充实而丰富。一天，她回家探望已届中年的父母，却被告知母亲得了癌症。父亲希望艾伦能回家照顾母亲，艾伦不情愿的回到父母身边，渐渐地，原本生疏的母女关系发生微妙的变化，家人在过去和现在生活中最真实的一面呈现在她眼前，母亲并非她曾认为的软弱胆小、碌碌无为，而是一位聪明坚强的女性。发现了父亲的很多黑暗秘密。母亲平静的去了，艾伦却受到谋杀母亲的起诉。故事的结局很是耐人寻味：经历了种种是非的艾伦，终于看清了自已内心真实的渴望，选择了自己想要的生活。

    生活总是这样简单而又复杂，不简单的是影后梅丽尔·斯特里普自身的张力，不复杂的也是她对生活的天然的理解力，以至于在我打下这段文字的时候，脑中还清晰留着那个扎着两个小辫子扮爱丽丝的可爱状的母亲，还有那个头发已经稀疏躺在浴缸起不来也不愿向女儿求助的瘦骨如柴的母亲。

    我不能说太多，我已泪流满面，人生只有一次，我那平凡而俗气的母亲，我该怎样面对你的离开。