by Hadley Hury
“‘You’ve become part of the Blue Bar,’ he said, as if that should be a suitable consolation prize for missing out on something I’d hoped for and had pretty good reason to plan for almost four years.…”
Silence again, for two or three minutes. Seventy or eighty yards across the dark, wide beach, the surf tossed and slithered restlessly.
Chaz said, “We have something in common.”
“A sense of fairness abused?” Terry asked, his brows raised.
“How about anger?”
Terry smiled and did not protest.
Chaz continued. “How about doing something about it? How about fighting for what should rightfully be ours? Has that crossed your mind?”
“It seems to have crossed yours.”
“Yes,” Sydney spoke up, “it certainly has.” She smiled, wide-eyed, purposeful.
“And?”
“We have to get back to the house now. When and where can we meet again briefly? And privately?”
“We don’t open for lunch Mondays, so I’m not due back here until about three-thirty. How about you taking a walk toward Seaside around one o’clock and my happening to drive past on my way to the post office and giving you a lift? How much time do you have in mind?”
Sydney answered, “Twenty minutes. No more than thirty. We want you to see the letter we mentioned.…”
“And we’re working on a plan. We hope—we think—you’ll be interested.”
Chapter 21
Hudson realized he had been staring at his last sentence for probably eight or ten minutes. He was working on a few minor revisions in one of the reviews that was to go in the book, and, of course, it was becoming apparent, as it always did, that there was no such thing as a minor revision. He remembered, however, that it was this fierce concentration that he loved about the act (or perhaps it was more the state) of writing. Sustaining for moments at a time, word by word by word, the closest thing he knew to pure, unadulterated, obliterating focus.
He had been writing about film since he’d moved back to Memphis almost ten years before and had not tired of it yet. Someday, he imagined, he might try some other form. Some critical overview of a period or genre, perhaps, or even a novel or short stories. But for now, his lifelong love of movies still provided what seemed to him a fortuitous excuse for putting words on paper.
His relationship to writing, like everything else, had undergone changes since Kate’s departure. For more than a year, he had considered telling the paper that he needed a sabbatical. Films with probing thought and genuine emotion were hell to sit through, much less re-examine to the nub for hours at the computer. And the frequent fare of banal action flicks and mindless comedies was no better: worlds without meaning were no escape from a world without meaning. Putting each word behind the last was as painstaking as it had ever been, but the concomitant reward had paled. Instead of spending his usual three or four hours to write about two movies on his Saturday mornings, he would often find himself still staring at the screen late in the day, having had nothing to eat. Sometimes he would even have to finish on Sundays, thereby crowding the day with whatever preparation he needed to do for his classes.
And, of course, there was the gnawing empty place in his schedule where an irreplaceable routine had developed. On Friday afternoons, he had usually gone directly from school to whatever new openings he was covering, and Kate would meet him for whichever of the two she most wanted to see. Afterward, they would stop somewhere for a bite to eat or, after the long day, head home for an easy dinner.
Whether whatever was left of his common sense prevailed, or perhaps because he was afraid of opening even wider the void that gaped beneath him, he kept doing it. “Putting each word behind the last is as painstaking as ever, but without the accompanying reward,” he had told Alex. To which Alex had replied, The process may not be for awhile what it was for you before, but now is most certainly not the time to give it up. He had looked sternly at Hudson. I don’t think I need to tell you what a metaphor is, do I? Hudson thought that beyond process, the work itself was off. It read to him like what it was: ideas dredged from an opaque consciousness and expressed as tediously as nails pounded through concrete.
It was instructive now, as he sorted through his years’ worth of disks, deciding what to include in the collection, to see that several of the reviews from that darkest era were among his best. He could see now that, just as was true of his teaching, the focus required for his writing had not only gotten him through, but now helped him to reconstruct himself on the other side of the abyss, to know at least some semblance of who he was.
It had seemed to him at the time that that first year in the classroom after Kate was gone must have been a complete loss for his students. He scarcely knew where he was, or why, much less what page they were on, what he had assigned for homework, or how even to begin explaining what Tennyson was getting at with “In Memoriam.” Only recently, looking over those notes and files as he made his way through the past year, did he begin to think that perhaps it had not been a total wash after all.
He was surprised to find lesson plans far more meticulously ordered than the rough sketches he usually relied on, like exhaustively detailed roadmaps he had instinctively created to keep himself moving from one point to another without stalling by the wayside or taking one of the myriad side roads into despair. And it seemed evident that he had toiled at compensating for the loss of humor and flights of imaginative give-and-take, with which he liked to think he had previously engaged his students, with a clear sequence of practical how-to’s, challenges and positive reinforcements tailored individually, precisely, and a certain calm atmosphere in which the girls seemed to thrive.
So it seemed with the writing as well. In most of the articles the arc of thinking was carefully built and, if not stylistically superior, had at least integrity of shape and tone and what must have been a very well hidden, subconscious delight in language.
***
He put his final touch on the sentence, getting his thought down exactly and in exactly the way he wanted to, and stood up and stretched. Cocooned from the midday heat, he’d been at it for nearly two hours. He took a carton of yogurt from the fridge, grabbed a spoon, and opened the front door. Immediately, an oven-like wave shoved in oppressively and, although the sun was behind the house now, the largely shaded front yard wiggled like an incongruous mirage. Flecks and shards of the blistering sun seethed like scattered bits of fire trapped beneath the canopy of trees. Moon, who had roused himself from a long nap on the cool tiles of the kitchen floor and was almost always ready for an adventure outdoors, paused at Hudson’s feet, feeling the blast on his face, and looked up. “Al fresco is not an option, Mr. Moon,” and the retriever smiled in agreement. Olive, who had never moved from the arm of the sofa where she reposed with one leg draped off the end like a rather relaxed sphinx, looked at both of them and then looked away again, as if they were pitiably insane.
Hudson closed the door and paced around the cottage for a few minutes, eating a piece of fruit, straightening some books and papers, walking back to put laundry into the dryer, and pausing on his return to look through the tall windows of the hall into the side yard, where only two young wax myrtle trees stood against the blazing afternoon of the Gulf midsummer. He thought again about what might do there. He had decided just the day before that he would definitely come back during his October break, and he wanted to plant something else there on the south side. Today he inclined toward a magnolia and some other evergreen, perhaps a red cedar.
As he sat down again at the computer, Hudson became aware that the oddly pleasurable feeling he had sensed these last few days was a luxurious sense of time. Time unhurried, unscheduled. And unfearful. Last night, he had wandered through early 20th-Century English choral music, the companionable blues of B.B. King, and some humorously elegant Cleo Laine jazz, until at last he realized that, on this particular evening, he really didn’t particularly want to hear music.
Suddenly, he was remembering that time and space were precious necessities, not merely the nightmare projections of his loss. Precious for someone whose life for nine or ten months of the year churned around impossible amounts of work, relentless schedules, and being on every single minute of the day, day in and day out.
“This,” he said aloud as he put in a new disk, tilting his head back and drawing deeply on a bottle of water, “is, perhaps, a bit of heaven.”
He began to read:
Home Before Dark Director and actors make One True Thing one truly fine film
Some of the early buzz about One True Thing, which is based on the 1995 novel by former New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen, is further proof, as if we needed it, of the barbarian dumbing-down of the media. Filmgoers should not be deterred by reviewers resorting to “weepie,” “melodramatic,” “heavy,” and other lame-brained labels that do not begin to describe One True Thing but that certainly swell the sad commentary on the state of critical thought in our society today. If Quindlen’s storyline has a few too many broad strokes and neat tucks, it is on the whole an intelligent, thoughtful, and moving study of a complex family dynamic.
Directed by rising star Carl Franklin, working from a screenplay by Karen Croner, and featuring a remarkable ensemble of actors, One True Thing is that rare project in which the creative elements, each strong in itself, combine in a memorable incandescence of filmmaking. In an era when many films assault the audience with cacophonous appeals to our lowest possible common denominators—negligible attention spans and desensitized appetites—One True Thing insists that the viewer lean in. It has a largeness of scale that has nothing to do with special effects; it has some violence but it’s of a psychic sort and discreetly deployed; its humor is credible rather than banal; and it has naked emotionality rather than maudlin sentiment. It is a real human journey that moves with the thrilling suspense of a dream and holds us fast. And though viewers may leave the experience with differing perspectives, when we reach the end we know we’ve been somewhere.
Franklin’s directorial artistry first caught the eye of a small but enthusiastic following seven years ago with the little sleeper One False Move, starring then relative unknowns Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton. (The movie played at theatres for about a minute; word-of-mouth subsequently generated video interest among film buffs.) Next came Devil in a Blue Dress. Even in these modest neo-noir projects, the insight and technical finesse were unmistakable. Franklin’s work has a muscular elegance of narrative, tone, and pace, and a canny capacity for exacting rich and subtle characterization. His films are seductively compelling: they move well and move us; they’re good-looking, smart, humane, as unafraid of stylistic adventure as they are of the small telling gesture and psychological and emotional complexity. With One True Thing, Franklin gets the sort of material and high-powered cast he deserves, and the result is an artistic whole even greater than the sum of its superlative parts, a poignant and passionate examination of one family in all its human seasons, sorts, and conditions.
The film is set in the late 1980s. George Gulden (William Hurt), a professor of literature and literary critic of some note at a college up East, asks (rather, insists) that his daughter Ellen (Renee Zellweger) come home from Manhattan to the small college town to care for her ailing mother, Kate (Meryl Streep). On a journalistic fast track at New York magazine, Ellen’s first impulse is that a nurse should be hired; she agrees to leave the city primarily to please her adored father. Ellen is not heartless, only ambitious. A word child, she has always emulated her father, not her mother, who is, by her own cheerfully tacit admission, one of the last of that breed of 1950s women who went to college (a) to find a husband and (b) perhaps to have a teaching certificate “to fall back on.” Ellen wants more than anything not to be like her mother, whose homemaking skills and interests seem to lack seriousness beside the intellectual glamour of her father. Even her mother’s pleasantness rankles Ellen; she has always associated it with insubstantiality. Her father’s irony has always suggested sophisticated depths of sensibility, her mother’s earnestness and uncomplicated smile, triviality.
In the hands of lesser actors and a director less imaginatively cinematic, the film might well have turned out to be arid and pretentious, an Ordinary People redux. Franklin illuminates, with a dramatic arc not unlike a suspense thriller, the unexpected and profound alterations in Ellen’s world as she comes to realize that neither her father not her mother is the person she has grown up perceiving them to be. The film is essentially a delicate character study; there is no overt action, only the course of an illness and a series of small epiphanies that accrue until they ultimately transform the characters’ understanding of one another. And of life. Franklin’s eloquent psychological realism, his embrace of emotion, and the brilliant deployment of detail in his mise en scene bring us into the story, face to face with the actors’ vivid performances; One True Thing is never less than absorbing; it is frequently, for long passages in which time seems suspended, riveting.
Zellweger, who proved her ingénue mettle opposite Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire, stakes out a new level of her actor’s craft as Ellen. It’s the sort of big role in which the sheer volume of screen-time itself can become a performance’s worst enemy, constantly threatening credibility pinpricks. Zellweger manages to navigate cleanly the subtle shadings in Ellen’s transformation. She never shows her hand by overdoing her initially unsympathetic chilliness or her subsequent warming and enlightenment; it’s an intelligent, evenhanded performance that draws the viewer into Renee’s shifting viewpoint.
Hurt, a skittishly self-conscious actor and one who, perhaps for that reason, has been known to grandstand occasionally, allows a notable degree of self-effacement here. Perhaps his recent turns in the classics on stage are proving instructive for his film work: there’s a fine Chekhovian obliquity in his George Gulden; perhaps it is Franklin’s tutelage. For whatever reason, this performance is Hurt’s best in years. It submerges itself thoroughly in the character and serves, shoulder to shoulder with his fellow actors, the exceptional sense of ensemble. His George is affable, attractive, self-absorbed, weak, and ultimately heartbreaking.
When Meryl Streep first appears early in the film, readying a surprise birthday party for George to which the guests come as their favorite literary character, the viewer fears that something may be terribly wrong, that the movie, along with Streep’s performance, is irremediably off on the wrong foot. We share for an uncomfortable moment the sullen Ellen’s view of her mother as a bit ridiculous. Even for a costume party, the sight of tall Kate Gulden bustling around the kitchen in short gingham pinafore and pigtails with bows seems ill-considered. In retrospect, we see that there is nothing about the scene, or about Streep’s choices, that is ill-considered; they say a lot about Kate and about Streep’s genius. The wife of an academic star, Kate has chosen Dorothy of The Wizard of Oz as her favorite character in literature, Dorothy, whose defining truism is “There’s no place like home.” And, as always, Kate is busy spreading good cheer and enjoying the moment; the last thing she would consider is that she might look faintly ridiculous. The scene prefigures Ellen’s, and the viewer’s understanding of this woman and is testament to Streep’s risk-taking commitment to her character. She is almost over the top in this scene, but as she then goes about layering Kate’s character, we realize how absolutely right she was to begin here.
Even ardent fans of Streep may often be heard to say that their favorite performances are the more “Streepless” roles, those in which the famous cerebration and technique, and even the distinctive swan-like visage, become transparent in the interest of a character whose persona we assume to be quite different from Streep’s own. (Silkwood is a good example; others might include Death Becomes Her, A Cry in the Dark, or even, to some degree, Out of Africa.) One True Thing allows Streep another opportunity to become, very fully, Streepless. Her Kate is galvanizing in her simplicity. This is not to say that Streep doesn’t
bring her formidable battery of skills to bear; as a matter of fact, she is able in One True Thing to combine nearly her entire range of styles into one keenly felt, beautifully detailed, luminous performance. Streep’s unpatronizing respect and affection for Kate provide the key, not only for Kate’s family’s deepening perspective of her, but for the viewer as well. Kate is a capacious role, an essentially generous role, and one of the most moving aspects of the film comes in having one of our great actors give her to us with such generosity. Kate’s illness demands a re-framing of the Gulden family’s shared truths, and the raw, sweet, power of Streep’s performance caringly ensures that Kate’s modest but nonetheless transformational spirit transcends the theatrical frame. The triumph of the film, and particularly of Streep’s performance, is the universality of its intimacy. This is a common touch of uncommon brilliance.
There are a couple of scenes, one a climactic Christmas moment in the town square, that do, indeed, seem stagy and dramatically overripe. It may also be noted that Streep gets a few standard diva shots meticulously calculated for garnering Academy Award votes; they never, however, seem appended, they arise naturally within the film’s emotional rhythm. If the film is occasionally manipulative, it’s a thoughtful manipulation, one with dramatic integrity, which it earns as it goes along. Franklin’s missteps account for perhaps a total of four or five minutes in an otherwise masterfully conceived and articulated two-hours-plus film. In these actors, he had rich natural resources with which to work; it is clear not only that he fully appreciated and was inspired by the potential, but that his cast wisely allowed his brilliant eye and rich sensibility to guide and inform their work.
