“One True Thing.”

Directed by Carl Franklin and written by Karen Croner. Based on the novel by Anna Quindlen. Running time: 121 minutes. Rated R (for language).

When we first see Meryl Streep in Carl Franklin’s “One True Thing,” there is the uneasy feeling that the actress has been abducted by Judy Garland and browbeaten by Martha Stewart.

Indeed, in her pigtails and ruby-red slippers, blue-and-white gingham dress and day-glow makeup, Streep’s character Kate Gulden is a woman of impossible energy and good cheer. Whirling about her suburban home like the tornado that gave Dorothy flight, she is a menopausal dynamo of supreme coordination and focus, an adoring wife and loving mother who is preparing to throw her husband, George (William Hurt), a surprise costume party for his birthday.

But when her daughter, Ellen (Renee Zellweger), arrives home from Manhattan to attend the party, she brings with her the film’s first hint of family trouble in a film loaded with family trouble. As Kate showers Ellen with affection, Ellen shrinks away. When Ellen tries to help her mother with party preparations, Kate hovers over her daughter as if she is incapable of helping. The result is an electric wall of tension that ignites between the two, humming and snapping even while Kate, ever the caregiver, tries to smooth things over.

Based on Anna Quindlan’s best-selling novel, “One True Thing” thrives in the toxicity of its relationships. As Kate’s party gets under way, it becomes clear that Ellen, a magazine writer, has lived her whole life trying to impress her literary professor father, while at the same time quietly resenting Kate for her prefeminist traditionalism and unflinching, unconditional love.

Midparty, with her father drunk and her mother still whirling about and aiming to please, Ellen sinks unhappily against a wall. “There’s no place like home,” she says. “Thank God.”

But home is where Ellen is destined to become rooted: The next day, her mother is struck down with cancer, a disease that sends this film — and these characters’ lives — into a tailspin.

“One True Thing” may have all the earmarks of a disease-of-the-week television movie, but it’s no cheap soap opera; the script is restrained, the acting and direction subtle and superb. When Ellen is ordered by her father to give up her career, move back home and take care of her dying mother, she puts up a fight, but ultimately gives in for fear of losing her father’s approval.

And yet her father, Ellen learns, is not worthy of her approval; he is a troubled man, flawed and not to be idealized. Indeed, in a film that demystifies parents by showcasing them as individuals with their own problems, Ellen gradually comes to understand in the face of her mother’s death that it is Kate who is remarkable, the one true thing in all their lives.

For Ellen, it is a lesson learned not too late. Grade: B+.

Video of the Week

“A Price Above Rubies.” Written and directed by Boaz Yakin. Running time: 116 minutes. Rated R (for language, nudity and brief strong sexual content).

In Boaz Yakin’s “A Price Above Rubies,” Renee Zellweger plays Sonia, a woman who literally burns for release from the closed society of Orthodox Hasidic Jews into which her parents have forced her to marry.

Willful and quick to anger, she is too much for her husband, Mendel (Glenn Fitzgerald), a young, timid scholar who would rather study the Torah than have sex with his wife. When Sonia does manage to lure her husband into bed, they have sex with the lights out, and with Mendel softly whispering “Abraham” and “Isaac” into her ear.

Frustrated, Sonia longs for her freedom, finding it, rather surprisingly, in the form of Mendel’s brother, Sender (Christopher Eccleston), a jeweler who offers Sonia freedom — but at a price above rubies.

Sonia must agree to become Sender’s mistress in order to become a gemologist at his underground jewelry empire. The agreement may harm Sonia’s soul, but it gives the film needed life. As Sonia takes on Manhattan’s jewelry district like a heroine straight out of a Judith Krantz potboiler, she encounters a hot-blooded Puerto Rican jewelry craftsman named Ramon (Allen Payne), who puts a fiery, sexual wrinkle into her suddenly lively life.

Still, Sonia’s not through paying, as it turns out that there’s also a price she must pay for Ramon, which, in the end, is handled so well that it lifts this otherwise quirky film to a grade above average.

Grade: B-

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear each Monday in the NEWS, and each Thursday on WLBZ’s “Alive at 5:30.”