A Therapeutic Experience

NEW YORK —  It’s pouring outside and there is snow on the street. The rain is the real thing, the snow isn’t. We’re in the picturesque town of Morristown, N.J., specifically on Farragut Avenue, which could be Anystreet, USA. And inside Anyhouse, USA, an old white three-story wood structure, a mother and daughter are having your basic gut-wrenching, tear-shedding argument.

“Don’t tell me what to do, Ellen! This is still my house. And I’m still the mother in this relationship.”

“I know it, Mom. I know you are. [Expletive]!”

While this could be any conversation between generations, in this case the words are being passionately spoken by Meryl Streep, as the doting and much-loved matriarch, and Renee Zellweger as her ambitious (and less lovable) daughter. The words are based on a novel called “One True Thing,” written a few years back by Anna Quindlen, who has made the trek out this one night to watch her words come to cinematic life. “Down the list of things you want on your movie set, the novelist who wrote the book is pretty low down,” Quindlen says with a laugh.

Her story, with a script by Karen Croner, is the tale of a family--William Hurt plays the philandering father--that is forced to understand one another when the mother becomes seriously ill. (The film opens Friday.) It sounds like a million others, but readers grabbed onto it big-time. It is also a mystery, concerning who helps the mother in the end.

On this night, Streep looks appropriately ashen and ill, wearing a white knit hat to cover her hair. Zellweger is dressed in black Levi’s and brown turtleneck and remains chirpy despite a week of very long days. She consents happily to chatting with Quindlen’s star-struck children, who have joined their mother on the set.

Overseeing it all is director Carl Franklin, a charismatic man whose last two films received critical praise--”One False Move” in 1992 and “Devil in a Blue Dress” in 1995--but whose more macho filmmaking may at first seem at odds with this delicate material. The serendipitous collaboration began when Franklin and his producer and wife, Jesse Beaton, were on the Charlie Rose show one night--and so was Quindlen. Franklin read her book on the airplane ride back to Los Angeles and was hooked.

“He said he had cried all the way through,” recalls Quindlen, “and I figured any man who would admit that and do it on an airplane should be perfect for the material.” For the producer-and-director team, the choice does not seem as unpredictable: “When you look at Carl’s films,” says Beaton, “you realize they’re quite emotional and deal with character. And family is very important in them.”

But the key element was Streep, also a fan of the book. “It was the kind of book you immediately went out and bought for people,” she says a few weeks after the emotional shoot ended. “It was sort of a paean to a kind of woman who is gone. One completely comfortable in her own skin and one who’s underestimated by her careerist daughter.”

The daughter of the piece, portrayed by Zellweger, 29, in what will be her most important role since winning Jerry Maguire’s heart, is emblematic of so many younger women who looked down slightly on homemaker moms as they raced their way through the professional world.

“She’s so different from me, in the way she sees the world,” Zellweger says. “But it was fun to play someone so selfishly ambitious. And so unapologetic about it all. I met with a few businesswomen beforehand, and they really felt empathy for a young woman who has to give up her job to go home and take care of her mother.”

In the end, her character sees the world a little more in the shade of gray, which is what the author intended. “I saw the mother-daughter relationship as a metaphor for the women’s movement,” Quindlen says. “One is total wife and mother, one is out there in the world--and where we end up is somewhere in the middle, which is the healthiest place to be.”

The movie shoot lasted about two months, and the challenge, according to everyone involved, was keeping the story from sinking into sentimentality. Again, the appeal of Franklin.

“What’s great about Carl,” says Streep, “is that in what’s essentially a girls’ picture and an interior story, he keeps it visually interesting. He’s a very muscular filmmaker, and that’s exactly what this needed. But he also cried on the set even more than Mike Nichols!”

“I’d like to think my style benefits the story,” Franklin says. While his crew is setting up a quiet scene in which Zellweger plays fondly with one of her mother’s mosaics and speaks coolly on the phone with her father, he is dressed in Levi’s and a sweatshirt, a ring in one ear. “Too much sentimentality can rob this subject matter of its seriousness. It’s also a challenge when a good percentage of the film takes place in a house.”

Producer Beaton says it is because of those hurdles that Franklin was ultimately chosen to direct. “He just knows how to film with energy and momentum,” she says. “He makes the camera move, and he keeps life infused in his work.”

Whether the subject matter proves to be a turn-on or turn-off for potential ticket-buyers, it was a key reason the movie’s participants jumped on board. As Streep says, “We all did this not unmindful of our own mothers.” Her mother is still living, and while Streep says she isn’t playing her, there is much about this character that she knows and loves.

“I’ve been looking for this script a long time,” Streep says, “in that I’ve always dreamed of playing a mother just going through her days. This is a celebration of what mothers put up with over the long term. All that nurturing that is done with no reward in sight.”

Streep, 49, describes her own mother as “inventive and interesting still.”

Carl Franklin, also 49, lost his mother to cancer: “So much felt personal when I read this,” he says, “but I don’t see it as a story about illness. It’s about getting to know your parents before it’s too late.”

The house in which they are filming feels like one in which a family can come together. There are family photos all over, though upon closer look, they reveal a younger Meryl Streep, a baby Renee Zellweger. The library--supposedly used by Hurt’s English professor--now features photos of him with famous writers like . . . Anna Quindlen. It’s a cozy environment of handmade mosaics and colorful quilts, the kind of homemade touch Streep’s character is fond of. There are even plants strategically withering on their vines, both to parallel Streep’s own condition and depict what happens when the daughter’s brown thumb pitifully takes over.

Clearly, no detail has been spared to bring what might seem a grim tale to humorous and moving life. Everyone, from the studio--in this case, Universal--to author to stars, is anxious to keep this from feeling like a movie-of-the-week.

“When the book first came out, Hollywood’s initial reaction was, ‘Family? Cancer? TV,”’ Quindlen says. “Our response was, “Didn’t any of you see ‘Terms of Endearment’ ”? Streep is particularly sensitive on the subject, her last film being 1996’s “Marvin’s Room,” which was also about a family’s coming to terms with a dying relative. With that film, too, there was an initial attempt to lure audiences in for other reasons, but, alas, it failed.

“I feel my friends at Miramax dropped the ball on that one,” says Streep, who tried unsuccessfully to get them to re-release it last spring to capitalize on Leonardo DiCaprio’s new success. “We did all this publicity thinking it would come out in January, but they brought it out in March when all momentum was lost. It was a real shame.”

Still, she and the others are grateful that, post-”Titanic,” these kinds of movies are being made at all. “Clearly, this is not a typical movie right now,” says Beaton, “but we’ve had a lot of support from Universal. I think they are moved by Carl’s take on the story. Whatever else ‘Titanic’ represents, it does mean five or six other movies don’t get made for that kind of money.”

The ones that don’t get made tend to be of the female-driven, small-piece variety. That, in turn, makes it more difficult for fine actresses such as Streep and Zellweger to find work. “These kinds of roles are so rare,” Zellweger says. “To find a part that is so strong and allows the character to go through so many changes...”

For Streep, things remain pretty constant. It’s not that there’s a lot out there, but what there is remains choice. “The ones that have substance, I do see,” she says. Coming out in November is “Dancing at Lughnasa,” and soon she starts filming the period piece “Mary Stewart” with Glenn Close. But she admits Hollywood isn’t generally kind to middle-aged women: “I’ve been offered three witches recently!” she says and laughs.

It’s 11 p.m. and “lunch” is being served down the street from the house in Morristown. The final, harrowing scene is still to be filmed, and director Franklin isn’t sure he likes the way it sounded during rehearsal. “I got to go work on the text,” he apologizes, “because there’s all kinds of subtext in this scene.” Specifically, a reference to birds sounded false, “the wrong sentiment,” he says.

It’s going to be a long night’s journey into day.