Review of Terms of Endearment (1983) by Alvin Y — 28 Aug 2012

Terms of Endearment, Great Movies.

"Terms of Endearment" is a startling brutal film, that holds comedic weight to it in-between the dramatic occurrences. James L. Brooks, who developed 'The Mary Tyler Moore Show' and 'The Simpsons' and also directed "Broadcast News" and "As Good As It Gets", has never topped himself after this film and probably never will again. This is really a comedy, but in the final third of the film that all changes.

Shirley MacLaine, who won the 1983 Best Actress Oscar for her performance, plays Aurora, a self-centered widow who lives in the upper-sides of Texas. She has raised a daughter, Emma, played with immense strength and sensibility by Debra Winger- who earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. While the movie centers around their turbulent relationship, it also centers around the men in their lives.

Winger is about to marry a handsome simple man- played by the underrated Jeff Daniels. Aurora objects to this at once, but this could be because she never will be satisfied with who her only child brings to the table. Emma still marries him, but as Aurora generally predicted, he turns out to be a cheating sleaze, dragging Emma and her three kids she eventually has with him, all the way from the outskirts of Iowa to the homelands of Nebraska. Yet because Emma is so fragile (and also no dummy), she puts up with it.

Meanwhile Aurora has a fling with her next door neighbor, played with comedic style by Jack Nicholson- who took home Best Supporting Actor. Nicholson is used for the comic relief, and a way to let Aurora let her hair (and eventually everything else) down and not act so...well so uptight. The interactions between these two actors in their scenes are among the film's highlights, including a very unexpected car ride that turns into a big mess.

And now the final third. Emma develops cancer, and is going to die. While this may come off as a TV Movie-of-the-Week type of deal, the way Brooks approaches the material is so realistic and true to life you never catch on that it's a movie. It seems real. And Winger especially plays her role like you would expect Emma to play it. Never going for over-the-top moments but letting the audience feel her thoughts. Her farewell to her children is the scene most people break down in. Her older son, around twelve, has been painfully difficult with her, while her younger son has been a saint. As she lays there giving them her final words, she tells her older boy that even though he's been pretending to hate her, she knows he really loves her. And when she's gone, he should never beat himself up about his treatment of her. That moment in the film brought me to the realization that "Terms of Endearment" had soared above to the elite group of films that make me applaud.