Terms of Endearment: Theme, Trailer, and Review

 

 

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
 



Upload by zuguidemovietrailers.
 

You’re surely wondering why I am using a video of the trailer, rather than one of the soundtrack, proper. There are several Youtube uploads, but every one that I could find was a hideous muzak butchery.

Terms of Endearment (1983) is the ultimate modern tearjerker “woman’s picture,” based on the eponymous novel by the ultimate woman’s writer, Larry McMurtry, author of such other beloved women’s stories as Horseman, Pass by ( Hud), The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove, Texasville, Streets of Laredo, Leaving Cheyenne, Cadillac Jack, Dead Man’s Walk, Comanche Moon, etc.

It seems like feminists not only don’t have a lock on writing about female characters, but may not even be the people to turn to, for such stories. Maybe it’s all about talent, rather than ideology and bean counting. How do you like them apples?!

ToE was nominated for 11 Oscars, and won five, including Best Picture, Actress (Shirley MacLaine), Supporting Actor (Jack Nicholson), Director and Adapted Screenplay. James L. Brooks took three Oscars, for Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay.

There is no story, in the usual movie sense, and yet this two hour-and-12-minute dramedy is anything but boring. Rather, the picture is a slice of the life of a well-to-do Texas family. Life, love, and death. It’s very hard to attractively summarize it, because as with so many movie masterpieces, the “concept” is a cliché, and the excellence is all in the execution. I also don’t want to leave too many spoilers.

Aurora Greenaway (MacLaine) lost her husband to a massive coronary early in life, which left her to raise their only child, little Emma (Debra Winger), alone. (Well, “alone,” except for the considerable help of the family maid.)

After a prologue showing Emma’s smothering approach to motherhood, we come to the movie proper, in which Emma is grown up, and has just married young to Flap Horton (Jeff Daniels).

Much of the movie tells the story of Emma and Flap’s up-and-down marriage, with the accent on the downs.

Aurora’s open disapproval of Flap is a running joke, including boycotting her only child’s wedding.

Aurora to Emma on the phone: Why do you keep having children with that man? You are not special enough to overcome a bad marriage.

Aurora and Emma also have a very difficult relationship, or rather, Aurora and anyone have a very difficult relationship.

Come to think of it, just about all of the relationships here are strained, just like in a real family!

Aurora goes years without taking on a lover, letting alone remarrying. Instead, she lets three frustrated, worshipful Texas suitors hang around her, panting for what she’ll never bestow on any one of them. She’s a stuck-up, middle-aged, you-know-what, who thinks she’s too good of any real man. Eventually, her longtime next-door neighbor, paunchy, middle-aged, wild man ex-astronaut, Garrett Breedlove (Nicholson), who’s deluding himself in a different way, breaks through her defenses.

Nicholson and John Lithgow (in a very small role) were both nominated for Best Supporting Actor, which Nicholson won by “being Jack,” but the unsung hero who wasn’t nominated but should have won, was Jeff Daniels, giving a stunningly naturalistic, underplayed performance. Of course, the Academy has rarely embraced underplaying. Its heart is at home in Gimmickville.

At the time, I was disappointed that Debra Winger lost out to Shirley MacLaine for Best Actress. For the movie to work, you have to either fall in love with, or identify with Winger’s Emma, but as Aurora, MacLaine gives the more powerful performance in an unsympathetic role.

The Academy may have voted her the Oscar based on her being nominated for the sixth time, without ever having won, and at 49, this probably being her last chance (which it was), or her having been cheated out of her deserved Oscar for 1960’s The Apartment, but she deserved it on the merits of this one performance alone. Although she’s great all the way through, two scenes stick out in my memory: The “hospital scene,” and the scene in which Aurora smacks one of her grandsons. And that is all I’ll say about that.

ToE currently ranks 60th on my top 100 movie list.

So, why can’t you find a decent ToE soundtrack at Youtube? The picture came out too early for most Youtubers; had no sex, profanity, or violence; no car chases; and no Hans Zimmer. And that’s the name of that tune.

P.S. I could have sworn that Eileen Brennan played the family maid, but she is not listed anywhere as having done so.)