One True Thing Film Analysis

one(a) True Thing depiction AnalysisThe film that I chose to watch for this writing assign ment was One True Thing. The story began with introducing a young char with a wangle action in cutting York. Ellen had a writing b peaked(predicate)inger that was fertilisener to look up that was, in a sense, stripped from her when she finds bring out from her begetter at his birthday party that her niggle, Kate, is ill with cancer. Ellen finds this out from her go when he acquires home from a routine appointment with his go and sees that she is non with him when he walks in the door. Kate is about to sop up cancer surgery and her stick expects her to gloaming her normal life story and move back home to care for her m some other. Her sky pilot beliefs as though she should be back in the home by and by the surgery has been hit and chemotherapy has been springed. Ellen is at a loss for words when her father asks her this. At one point she asks why her brother could not incumbrance home and tend to their mother. The father was not at all touch with how Ellen felt and the fact that this could ruin her chances at moving up in her writing career.Ellen was immediately thrown into the housewife role with having to do her fathers laundry, having to bring in for the family and guests, and withal by having to figure out how to make the household run smoothly. As her mother begins to levy weaker and weaker, Ellen gets a glimpse into the life her mother has been living for so long. She finds that her mother is involved with the community on special(prenominal) occasions, cooks such wonderful meals, decorates and refinishes furniture, makes time to comfort friends that are facing challenges, and to a greater extent(prenominal) or less important of all, she en authoritatives that her husbands life runs seamlessly. In the start of the film, we can see that Ellen is attempt to keep everything together. She is in no path apply to this and has never seen herself as this kind of a woman that would run a household same(p) this one. She had al sorts grown up admiring her father and clean valued to grow up and be the incredible writer that he had always been. By this point, Ellen discovers for her mother and realizes that she had so much that was always expected of her, only if this also benefactors Ellen realize how much her mother needs her. With all of this going on, she curtly also realizes how little her father does more(prenominal) or less the house. The viewers can see, as the movie progresses, that her father is not as self-centered as he go fars moody as and that he is yet distraught about the imagination of losing his wife somebody that does so much for him and who makes his life run the way that it does. He cant imagine this life without her and does not destiny to personate around and watch his wife late slip get through.This whole opinion that the father actually cared about the fact that his wife was s lowly expiry was not evident at the beginning of the film, it was actually seen as the complete opposite. Ellen watches as her father continues to have affairs late at wickedness while he is supposed to be working. This enrages Ellen because how in the world could he do this to his wife and the mother of his children. Was the fact that she was doing everything for him not enough to fill him? Another event was when the family was supposed to have a Thanksgiving dinner party with exclusively the five of them. Her father thinks that it would be a wonderful motif to forget about the plan that the family had agreed on and invite both writers, which he admires, to the family dinner. He then has the balls to ask his wife to get move out of the bed whip up some appetizers for his guests. Oblivious to the fact that she is in bed because she does not feel well. This is the time when Ellen finally found her part and became confrontational with her father. Tensions flared in the househol d between the two and more things start to set Ellen off. Each night that her father calls, she cant help scarce think that he is having an affair with the other woman he seems to care so much about. One night when her father had still not come home, Ellens mother asked her to go and fetch her father. She finds her father, at a diner, slumped all over the table. She urges him that he needs to come home but I feel as though he is more ashamed by his style to his daughter and tells her to leave. This caused Ellen to become confrontational because at this point she is so queer with her fathers lack of compassion for his own wife and that fact that her reason is declining. He tells Ellen that she has done enough at this point and that she is more than welcome to think to her life back in the big city.Following this, the mothers condition declines greatly. The Chemotherapy is no bimestrial benefiting her and her cancer has spread. Ellen fights with the doctor and believes that the y should continue treatment because she is not ready yet. The only real option at this point is to make her loose while she lives out the rest of her days. Before she gets to the point of being bedridden, Kate makes sure that she has a discussion with both Ellen and her father. She wants to let Ellen know that she is well aware(p) of what her husband has been doing over the years and that she still loves him. They have come to an fellow feeling and she loves what she does have with him. Kate wanted, more than anything, to just be able to talk to someone about how she really felt. Maybe she had a fake smile on over the years and now she was able to express her concerns.With Kate now being on morphine pills multiple times a day and her condition declining with each day, Ellen has a lot more responsibility. A nurse would come to help on some days during the week to make things go a little more smoothly, but one day Ellen had to help her mother out of the tub. This is when she final ly axiom the severity of her mothers condition. Her head was slowly balding, and her body was turning into merely a skeleton. After settling her mother into a wheelchair, she is faced with a disheartening situation when her mother expresses that the way she was living was no way to live. In a sense she is enquire for Ellen to end the pain. The end of the film is when the mother drugs on morphine pills and passes away on her hospital bed in the living room. An investigation followed the end of Ellens mother and both Ellen and her father were suspects. Both were under the impression that the other had done it. They later happen to cross paths at Kates gravesite and they find out that neither of them was responsible for overdosing Kate. She had somehow managed to get out of bed and overdose herself because she knew that neither of them would be able to be strong enough to do it themselves.In the recent years, death has started to become more mainstream. I am saying this because pro -suicide, pro-euthanasia attitudes are being more openly expressed. This could also just be that people are finally allowing themselves to talk about the radical and that it actually has been around for a good amount of time. When it comes to the films that use this as a topic in their films, it is usually not the primary import that is broadcasted throughout the film. In One True Thing does not revolve about primarily on this issue, but at the end of the film, there is a sense of pro-death attitude slipped into the background. The main part of this film is devoted to the descent shared between a mother and daughter. The mother is deathly ill and the father has enlisted the help of the daughter to overlook everything in her life to come home and tend to any of her mothers needs.The movie played out more like a flashback from the viewpoint of the daughter Ellen and I think that was a big part that I leftfield out of the summary. She was speaking with an lawyer regarding the mor phine overdose of her mother and how the events led up to it. In a sense, the au endurence is left shootinging about how the mother will die throughout the film will it be natural causes, the cancer taking her life, but we as the audience would never be able to guess that she died of an overdose. At some point we are left questioning whether it was a mercy killing executed by either her husband or daughter. This move implies that all of these means of dying are morally accepted, but none of the relevant issues are explored in any depth. Instead, the situation is used as a whodunit device to spin up an other straightforward issue.With Ellen having such a strong belief about how her life should run and her attitudes regarding her career and family were formed primarily by contemporary womens lib. She was a Harvard graduate in her late 20s and scored a job with a high-profile New York magazine, so she could be seen as not being the typical woman one would think of in 1988. Ellen de fines her life and herself according to her professional achievement and her personal relationships, whether family or intimate, are taking a spot on the sidelines. She is a strong and successful woman that is believes that woman are just as qualified to compete at the same level as men. Her mother, on the other hand, is what one would call a pre-feminist housewife. Her life revolves around the wellbeing of her husband and children, while her own needs stand off to the side. This is why, I believe, the cancer was allowed to progress to the point that it did because she would just shrug off the symptoms. Kate was also a great help in the local charities and was, at that time, the perfect housewife. The difference between Ellen and Kate becomes an issue when Ellens father tells her that she needs to drop everything and come back home to live in the family home and contain care of her mother. He assumes that every woman should be capable and dexterous to complete the same housewife tasks that most women take on. Ellen made it a point in the film to say that she never wanted this life for herself. She never wanted to become the housewife and she looked up to her fathers lifestyle and believed that that was what she wanted to strive for.In the beginning of the film, when George and Ellen are sitting on the porch, Ellen asks her father how he feels about her recent piece that she wrote for the magazine. At first, he just gave a basic answer and said that it was good but that was not good enough of an answer for Ellen. When she asked a second time, she finally veritable the check she had been asking for. George said that her paper as well emotional and that she unavoidable to add a more masculine hint to her work. This sounds to me as though he wants her to hide who she really is and act as though a man is writing the article. He makes the chin wagging that Less is more, a comment that was heard a little too often in the film. George seems to want to hold his daughter back in a way. Maybe he wanted to see his son reach her level and become a great writer like him, because back in that time, I would feel as though recognition for a son would be more beneficial than recognition for a daughter.Kate was a woman that only saw the positives during her battle with cancer. She strived to complete all of the daily tasks that she was used to doing until she no longer could manage. She can be seen as a very powerful woman, but I think she was struggling most with the idea of being pass and not being able to tend to her family. When she was told about how George told Ellen that less is more she counteracted and told Ellen that more is more. She is someone that wanted Ellen to hold onto all of her strong traits and stupefy the woman that she had become. In the film, the viewer can see that most of the men are portrayed to be weak and terrible people. This is more of the feminism coming into play. George is depicted as being self-centered, out of to uch with his feelings, and a philanderer. Ellens brother flunked out of Harvard, while she excelled in the program, and he was then too afraid to tell his parents because of the idea of being a failure and the criticism that he would face from mainly his father. This is one of those examples of when men were thought to have been treated as better and more powerful people than women. finis the movie, we are faced again with the morphine overdose that took the life of Kate. It wasnt until the drop dead scene that we find out that she managed to do it herself and commit suicide and miss the pain she was in. This can easily be seen as the most denigrating message in the film because its suggestion that the willingness to commit suicide, or to do a loved one in the act is somehow check of psychological strength and maturity when it is indeed the complete opposite. This twist at the end leaves the view in a kind of awe. We were initially left to think that the father crushed the pill s and put them into Kates food, because Ellen had backed out. At the gravesite is when the fair play was finally figured out because both Ellen and George thought that the other was blameworthy for assisted in Kates death.One True Thing. Dir. Carl Franklin. By Karen Croner. Perf. Meryl Streep, Renee Zellweger, andWilliam Hurt. Universal Pictures, 1998. HBO GO.