She may not be up to her professor husband's smarts, but Streep's small town
Madonna loves doing "creative things around the house" and working on community
projects. Then she gets cancer, and her journalist daughter (Renée Zellweger) is
called home
... moreto care for a woman she mostly holds in contempt. As you might
guess, daddy's girl discovers much to admire about her mother, while her faith
in her father's superiority is almost entirely shattered. All very predictable,
just what you would expect from this brand of tearjerker. And then suddenly,
Streep cuts through all of the sentimentality and easy assumptions. Sitting on
the floor, photograph albums open around her, the dying woman reveals how much
she really knows and understands about marriage's interwoven gifts and
compromises. Streep fairly blazes in this monologue, like some Ingmar Bergman
heroine loosing lacerating truths about husbands and wives. Cancer sagas turn
Oscar on, but the one true thing in this weeper is that single, shattering
scene.
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