Renee Zellweger and Meryl Streep are frequently seen in movies with introverted heroines. Here they are together! Perhaps this is why they are two of my favorite actresses.

In this movie Renee Zellweger plays a young writer on the rise, who has finally gotten her break for a New York magazine. While home for a birthday party for her nearly famous writer father (William Hurt), she learns that her mother (Meryl Streep) has been diagnosed with cancer. Then her father does the unthinkabl. He all but commands her to put her career on hold to take care of her mother and nurse her through her illness. Dad, a popular college professor who has never gotten the literary acclaim he always believed he deserved, essentially checks out -- and daughter must play parent to her mother. Strong performances by Streep and Zellweger give this parent-child relationship the heart -- and the anger -- of the real thing, while Hurt seems slightly disembodied as the self-involved father whose needs have dominated both women. [from an amazon.com review]

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