Word: gulden
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...film, based on a novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Anna Quindlen, zeroes in on a single American family and manages to weave a stunningly intricate emotional epic. Ellen Gulden, played by Renee Zellweger, is a reporter for a Manhattan magazine leading the frenzied life of a normal New Yorker (the recent trends of female heroines working as magazine editors is starting to become both annoying and disturbing). The main narrative unfolds in flashback, as Ellen is being questioned by a district attorney about the possibility that she assisted in her cancer-stricken mother's death. Through her answers...
...hard to see why Streep wanted the role as Kate Gulden. For one thing, she gets to do another accent. (This time, it's a sweet mothery voice that seems deliberately constructed to contrast with Zellwegger's slight poutiness.) She also makes the most of juicy monologues where she not only pours out her soul, but also gives us a devastating and unglamorous portrait of a woman rendered helpless by the ravages of disease. But Streep avoids the overacting bug. She never gives us more than what Kate really is--a mother who knows nothing else but the instinct...
...Kate Gulden (Meryl Streep) is the kind of woman who gives surprise costume parties for her husband's birthday, is worried about her careerist daughter's lack of culinary skills and spends far too much time with like-minded ladies making sure the town Christmas trees are suitably decorated. She is, in short, the kind of person no one, including her loved ones, takes very seriously--until she begins dying before her time...
These brooding half-truths are the night thoughts of Ellen Gulden, a brilliant, self-absorbed and slightly chilly young woman who goes home grudgingly from a promising magazine job in Manhattan to tend her dying mother. She's the only acceptable nurse. Her college-age brothers can't help much. Besides, her pampered father, a philandering literature professor on whose preening intellect she has modeled her own, has demanded that she come. Ellen, once the town prodigy, now awkwardly learns to change sheets and cook supper...