Susan Morton (Nancy Travis) is an attorney and a single mother who learns she has cancer so she takes her daughter, Carson, age 9, back to California where she grew up and where her parents still live. While there, she meets and falls in love with Michael Blake (Scott Bairstow), a waiter. Later, after her young lover leaves her when she tells him she has cancer, she learns her disease is not responding. (Later, she finds out the cancer has spread to her brain and the inference is clear: the disease is terminal). Shortly after Michael leaves (we learn he lost his sister to cancer), Susan's precocious daughter finds him and convinces him to return to her mother, which he does.
Although the performances are above average, the things we see in this movie are disturbing and not for the obvious reasons of this being a "terminally-ill-mother disease of the week" movie. The daughter is a spoiled, precocious, angry child who is incredibly fresh to her mother. Granted, this was made in the late 1990s but even at my age, I would never think to speak to my mother or my grandparents the way this child speaks to her relatives. This really disturbed me and I did not and do not excuse it because the child's mother is dying.
Another disturbing thing is that this woman is living with a man who is neither her husband nor her daughter's father. Again, I realize this movie was made in the 1990s but a man and woman living together without being married but with a child in the house causes me some qualms.
Finally, there is the stereotypical "single mother vs. the old 'square' parents" (Susan's parents, played so well by character actors James Karen and Holland Taylor). Susan is a free-spirited professional woman who has had a couple of boyfriends after her divorce from Carson's father. Her parents, meanwhile, are portrayed as stuffed shirts who -- god forbid -- want their granddaughter to look like a feminine little girl instead of like a "member of a gang." Finally, Susan's parents want custody of Carson when Susan dies but instead, Susan sees to it her boyfriend gets custody. Maybe this is the "modern" thing to do but that doesn't make it right.
The last half hour of this movie is a little more universal - a dying woman asks her mother if she really loves her. This same woman then tells her daughter she is enough, to keep her heart open and to always be true. These are universal lessons and were told wonderfully in an incredible acting by However, we could have done without the modern morality tale and then it would have been worthy of being compared to "Terms of Endearment" or "Message from Holly."
