Plot
The movie chronicles one woman's (Meg Ryan) alcoholism and her husband's (Andy Garcia) efforts to help her.
Meg Ryan plays Alice Green, a school counselor who has a serious drinking problem and is married to Michael (Andy Garcia), an airline pilot. Though she's lighthearted and loving, Alice is often reckless and, when drunk, even neglects her children, nine-year-old daughter Jess (Tina Majorino) from a previous marriage, and four-year-old daughter Casey (Mae Whitman), whose father is Michael. After an accident, Alice realizes that she has "hit bottom" and goes into a clinic for rehab. When she returns home, she has kicked her addiction and has become independent and strong, and her perfectionist, controlling husband has trouble adjusting. Michael is used to his wife being weak and helpless, and they end up seeing a marriage counselor to recover from Michael's "co-dependency" on Alice's role as an alcoholic. Then Alice gets the help she needs, but realizes she can't be with Michael. However, even through all the trials and tribulations Michael gets back together with Alice after deciding to move to Denver. He returns on the day she gives a speech at an AA function. Her speech is about how everyone deserves a second chance. He kisses her for a long time as the credits roll.
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Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
I want to make
something imagined, not recalled?”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)