Terms of Endearment (1983) * * * *

 

Directed by:  James L. Brooks

 

Starring:  Shirley MacLaine, Jack Nicholson, Debra Winger, Jeff Daniels, Danny DeVito, John Lithgow

 

Terms of Endearment gets the feeling right of a love between parent and child surviving squabbles, tears, joys, sorrow, and soon physical distance.    In this Best Picture Oscar winner, Houston suburbanite Aurora Greenway (MacLaine) lives next door to a womanizing, heavy-drinking astronaut (Nicholson) and hasn't had any relationships since her husband passed away.     Her daughter Emma moves away from Houston with her college professor husband Flap (Daniels) to a small Midwestern university.    Flap and Emma raise two children, but Flap has a problem resisting the charms of his female students, which causes obvious tension in the marriage.

 

Emma and Aurora speak on the phone daily as they attempt to manage their respective lives.    Turns out Aurora has a problem resisting the charms of the astronaut Garrett Breedlove.    What an apt name for him.    Garrett prefers younger women, but soon finds Aurora irresistible, possibly because she is at first put off by him and thus presents a challenge for the lascivious astronaut.     Nicholson and MacLaine play off each other so well, mostly because each hides behind facades which lower only gradually.    They soon see the best and worst in each other.    We see sparks of compassion and maybe even shyness in Garrett, which allows us to see a character we can't make easy assumptions about.    Nicholson, sly grin and all, won an Oscar for his work as did MacLaine.    It is little wonder.   They each capture all the right notes.

 

Debra Winger had the unfortunate luck to be nominated for Best Actress alongside eventual winner MacLaine, but she is not outshined in any respect.    We see how she can put up with Flap, but only so much, but we also see a gentler side in her own extramarital affair with sweet banker Sam Burns (Lithgow), who idealizes Emma as well as gives her the sweetness lacking in each person's marriage.

Why Terms of Endearment works so well is its ability to present its characters as three-dimensional and human.    They don't act according to a script, but their behavior evolves out of human nature, which is passionate, sometimes right, and sometimes wrong.  

 

I won't reveal the plot twist which is sad and seemingly out of left field, but isn't that how things go in life?    I enjoyed how the situation brings out the best and worst in others.    We see how all of this may be too much for someone like Garrett to handle, but doggone it, he loves Aurora enough to be there for her even if he isn't comfortable doing so.     "And I thought I was making a clean getaway," he confesses to Aurora, and there is no point in the movie in which we like him more than that one.

 

Terms of Endearment is a movie which dares to be about people and not plotlines, and we are fascinated all the same.     Sometimes all it takes to make a memorable movie is to create people with vivid human dimensions and let them do their thing.