Reeling Backward: Terms of Endearment (1983)
A rather atypical Best Picture winner, this look at the complicated relationship between mother and daughter is notable for bucking conventions rather than serving them.
It had been years since I saw “Terms of Endearment” — quite possibly, not since its release four decades ago — and my hazy memory posited it as a good but fairly conventional “women’s picture,” a ‘you’ll laugh, you’ll cry’ sort of affair that is deliberate in its wringing of tears from the audience.
Indeed, in the 41 years since its release the movie has become almost a tearjerker cliché, even a source of parody, with its tale of the complicated relationship between a mother and her daughter who comes down with a third-act case of terminal cancer.
It’s been much imitated since, whether those filmmakers acknowledge it or not.
Watching it again in an excellent new 4K/Blu-ray edition, I was struck what an atypical film it truly is — especially one that swept the 1983 Academy Awards with wins for Best Picture, Actress (Shirley MacLaine), Supporting Actor (Jack Nicholson) and both directing and adapted screenplay awards for James L. Brooks, based on Larry McMurtry’s book.
The film has a very loose, improvisational feel — you never feel like you catch the cast playing to the camera. OK, maybe Nicholson a bit, but that’s the part he was handed as boozy, washed-up astronaut Garrett Breedlove. He moves in next to Aurora Greenway (MacLaine), a hypertense widow in the Houston suburbs, but they don’t begin an affair until years later.
Garrett’s an embodiment of caricature, the aging bachelor who thinks he can keep scoring with pretty young things indefinitely, though his balding pate and protruding belly are already producing giggles from his targets — unfooled by his shit-eating permagrin.
Brooks wrote the part with Burt Reynolds in mind, who turned it down to make “Stroker Ace” instead — just one of the actor’s many catastrophic career mistakes. It wound up reviving Nicholson from the doldrums.
Paul Newman (interesting!) and Harrison Ford were also considered. Ford seems way too young to play opposite MacLaine, though they’re just eight years apart in age. I don’t think Ford, then at the height of his Indiana Jones/Han Solo early stardom, was looking to play a paunchy has-been.
Aurora also has a rotating cast of other middle-aged men sniffing around looking for romantic favors, including Norman Bennett and Danny DeVito, whose character has a Texas-sized ego despite his diminutive stature and total lack of a chance with her. Aurora is very much the sort to keep these men hoping just so she can have the attention.
Her main relationship in the story is with Emma, her only child played by Debra Winger. Aurora cannot trouble herself to hide her disappointment in the way Emma turned out, who marches on with a self-aware, hopeful attitude just the same.
Their dynamic is established in the very first shot of the film, where Aurora comes into baby Emma’s bedroom convinced the child is dead because she’s not making any noise. Over her (never seen) husband’s protestations, she pokes and prods the baby until Emma wakes up crying. Satisfied, Aurora leaves the girl to wail on her own.
It’s a classic codependent, love/hate relationship, one reportedly shared by the two actresses in real life… minus the love part.
Winger and MacLaine clashed constantly throughout the production, something director Brooks apparently allowed or even tacitly encouraged as he thought it would stoke their onscreen fights. By one account, Winger even deliberately farted in MacLaine’s face during a scene.
(Maybe she was being Method?)
They wound up both being nominated for Best Actress, and Winger has continued to carry the grudge of losing to her co-star all these years later. She is indeed magnificent as Emma — flawed, authentic, funny, vivacious. But anyone watching the movie understands it’s Aurora’s show.
(Nowadays I think the studio would’ve campaigned heavily to put the younger actress in the supporting category, despite the obvious fact they’re both leads.)
The story covers the span of roughly the late 1960s to the early ‘80s, with Emma evolving from young ingenue to dissatisfied wife and mother. Meanwhile, Aurora struggles with the concept of getting older and less the focus of attention — her face positively curdles whenever anyone mentions the fact she’s a grandmother. She jumps at Garrett almost as a coping mechanism, and then finds herself developing real feelings for him.
The main source of their ongoing contention is Emma’s early marriage to the purposefully named Flap Horton, a young professor of literature played by Jeff Daniels. Further driving a wedge is Flap moving her to Iowa because that’s the only place he can get an associate professor job.
Aurora is typically blunt in her assessment: Flap is “limited,” aka neither particularly bright or ambitious or decisive, and Emma will eventually grow restless and malcontent.
“You are not special enough to overcome a bad marriage,” Aurora warns, in a way that says she actually thinks she’s giving good advice.
This is exactly what comes to pass, aided by continuing financial struggles and Emma’s suspicion that Flap is cheating on her. She returns the favor by carrying on an affair with Sam, a kind and sensitive banker played by John Lithgow (another Oscar nominee), whose wife is unable to have sex because a physical ailment prevents her from having weight on her.
When Emma asks whether he has requested her to be on top instead, Sam blithely answers “About 600 times.”
Brooks is a master at crafting dialogue like that — perfectly encapsulating a moment, drawing a laugh and yet always seeming like something an actual person would say. (Though maybe it’s plucked straight from McMurtry’s book, unread by me.)
Another keeper line is Sam, to the young checkout girl at the grocery store who gives Emma a big hassle when she doesn’t have enough money to pay for her items. Sam gives over the cash and tells the girl she’s being rude, and she denies it. “Then you must be from New York,” he retorts.
(A line that draws solid laughs everywhere in the country except NYC, where denizens remain stubbornly in denial about their low baseline of accepted manners. And yes, I lived there for more than a year so I get to say so.)
More: Aurora, after Flap moves Emma away to Iowa, and later Nebraska: “He can't even do the simple things, like fail locally.”
Then there’s probably the most famous scene in the movie, where Emma is dying in the hospital and it’s a few minutes past the time she’s supposed to receive her pain medication. Aurora roars around the nurse’s station screeching, “Give my daughter the shot!”, and then the second the terrified woman trots off to administer it, her genteel Texas lady mask goes back on.
Winger also gets a terrific speech while on her deathbed to her sons, sweet young Teddy (Huckleberry Fox ) but mostly directed to older, surly Tommy (Troy Bishop):
“I know you like me. I know it. For the last year or two, you've been pretending like you hate me. I love you very much. I love you as much as I love anybody, as much as I love myself. And in a few years when I haven't been around to be on your tail about something or irritating you, you could... remember that time that I bought you the baseball glove when you thought we were too broke. You know? Or when I read you those stories? Or when I let you goof off instead of mowing the lawn? Lots of things like that. And you're gonna realize that you love me. And maybe you're gonna feel badly, because you never told me. But don't — I know that you love me. So don't ever do that to yourself, all right?”
They also have a toddler daughter at the time of Emma’s death. At the wake, Garrett plays with the little girl and Aurora quips, “She’s too old for him.” He had predictably gotten cold feet after their relationship moved beyond simple sex, but heroically reappeared when Emma grew ill.
After her diagnosis but before feeling poorly, Emma takes a trip to New York City to visit her oldest friend, Patsy (Lisa Hart Carroll). The sequence only lasts a few minutes of screen time but is substantial in its cultural discordance. Sweet, slightly acerbic Emma is seen as quaint by Patsy’s circle of powerful career women, all clad in shoulder suits and all divorced.
Their looks of horror when she tells them “I’ve never really worked” is priceless.
My one quibble with the movie is the character of Flap. Distant, a little goofy, he seems to genuinely love Emma but also doesn’t do much to keep her happy. He claims to constantly fall asleep on the coach at the university library, rather than admitting he’s staying out all night with other women. Tommy’s main source of hostility toward Emma is that she’s pushing his dad away, though if anything she gives Flap far too much slack.
In the end, Emma asks Flap to let her mother raise their children after she’s gone. It’s both a final testament of her deep love for Aurora, despite their incompatible personalities, and taking a burden off Flap’s shoulders that he’d rather not admit he’s too weak to carry.
Maybe this seemed like a reasonable thing in 1983, when raising children was still very much seen as women’s province and fathers were mostly there to provide a paycheck. But Emma offers him the grace of making it seem like a noble act rather than another example of him letting her down.
“I'm thinking about my identity, and not having one anymore,” Flap says at the prospect of being a widower. “I mean, who am I, if I'm not the man who's failing Emma?”
In parting I want to comment on the musical score by Michael Gore, who also worked with James L. Brooks on 1987’s “Broadcast News,” one of my all-time favorite films. He won two Academy Awards for best music and song for “Fame,” but Hollywood seemed to lose a taste for his sound as the decade came to a close.
His signature is a pulsing beat with bright little wisps of melody, often using flutes, piano or synthesizers to carry the tune. I suppose you could say it’s a very 1980s sound, or even like something you’d hear on television of the day. But I just love the way he could somehow capture both joy and sadness in a single musical phrase.
I went back for a visit with “Terms of Endearment” remembering a lovely but conventional little film. With its vibrant cast, jazzy sort of delivery and unblinking look at the way relationships can bring us both boundless happiness and irritation, it’s anything but.