Terms of Endearment (1983)

 

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The winner of Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 1983 was “Terms of Endearment”, yet I never watched it before and even the name of the movie is one I have only heard mention in passing. What I did learn watching it, was that for all its apparent qualities, this is not a movie I would seek out and probably one I would not want to watch again. Maybe I did not miss much all those years.

Aurora Greenway (Shirley MacLaine) is a woman with one concern in her life: herself. Everybody around her is a concern for her only as they relate to herself. An episode in the very opening of the movie is telling. Aurora is concerned her baby girl may not be breathing. Her husband tries to tell her it is just sleeping. She enters the room, crawls halfway into the crib, shakes the baby awake so it starts to cry. Then satisfied the baby is indeed breathing she leaves the room with the baby crying, unattended.

Aurora is widowed when Emma, her daughter is still a child and their relationship is the focus of the movie. Emma (Debra Winger as Emma grows up) becomes a one-person support group for Aurora while she in turn is smothered by her mother. While Aurora’s sole purpose is her vanity, Emma is a more complex size. She always has her mother trying to run her things and so it seems that her fight is to get her own way. She marries Flap (Jeff Daniels) mostly because her mother does not like him and yet she remains close to her mother. For both the women, however, my lasting impression is that they are both very self-centred.

Flap gets a teaching position in Iowa, far away from Texas and Emma and Flap have three children together, but the pattern remains. The children learn that they are second, they need to give space to their mother. Flap, well, he has his work and eventually also an affair there. The suspicion of such an affair is enough to throw Emma into an affair of her own.

Meanwhile in Houston, Aurora is courted by many men, but start seeing her astronaut neighbour Garrett (Jack Nicholson). Garrett actually challenges her and refuses to be used as a mirror for her which is actually good for her and whatever improvement there is on Aurora, is largely due to Garrett.

I realize writing my synopsis that rather than telling of a plot or a narrative, I am merely trying to make a portrait of Aurora and Emma and I guess this is what this movie is all about. It wants us to understand these two people, but the more I learn about them, the more I come to dislike them. Or rather, I disliked them early on and it never gets better. No matter where they end, it is mostly about themselves. Tom, Emma and Flap’s oldest son, is a good image of my dislike. He sees both Aurora and his mother as failing him, his brother and their father. In Aurora and Emma’s life, there is simply not room for them.

This is a movie that is very strong on acting. The sheer number of nominations and wins in the acting categories is a testament to that. But it is also about people I dislike intensely, so rather to earn that sympathy the movie wants me to give them, I feel like kicking them and protect their surroundings from them. I hate to say it, but the “tearjerker” ending felt to me more like relief.

Obviously, a lot of people like and liked “Terms of Endearment”. While it is obvious Oscar bait, it also worked amazingly well at the box office. Whether it is because people really like selfish people or like to watch annoying people ruin theirs and other people’s lives, I do not know. Neither really works for me.

I think I can name quite a few movies in 1983 I would rather have winning.