Terms of Endurement…errr…EnDEARment was actually a really good movie up until the point it realized it could win Best Picture, then took a nonsense turn to ensure its victory. It focuses around a memorable mother-daughter combo in Debra Winger and Shirley MacLaine and follows them as they discover life, love, and yadda yadda, it’s a chick flick.
Shirley MacLaine plays Aurora, an over-protective single mother who sees the world through cold, cautious eyes, the kind that only translate into fear of losing control. She’s stern, fierce, and has focused so much of her time and energy trying to ensure that her daughter can lead a good life, she’s forgotten what it feels like to enjoy her own. This “strength” has piqued the interest of many gentlemen suitors, some of whom aren’t afraid to be forward with their attractions, but Aurora embraces it like one would embrace a porcupine.
On the flip side of this is her daughter Emma (Debra Winger), who is the inevitable by-product of an over-protective upbringing: a rebel who acts on instinct. Her initial instinct is to marry her love Flap, whose biggest dream and aspiration is to be a teacher which, in the eyes of Aurora, is too lackluster of a goal for a man marrying her daughter to have. She’s feisty, care-free, reckless. She takes the seriousness that her mother exudes and laughs at it even to the point where when Aurora says she won’t be attending the wedding because she has that much resentment, Emma just walks away and chuckles in a “could have seen that coming” kind of tone.
The bulk of the movie is spent following Emma as she learns to live with the consequences of her decision and cutting back regularly to Aurora, who is learning to live without having someone to think about other than herself. The transformations these two women take as the years progress takes it a step further than the typical “daughter learns why her mother raised her this way” and tacks on “and mother begins to understand the joys of living the care-free lifestyle like her daughter.” The two find a common ground and embrace it beautifully.
For Emma, her understanding of her mother’s position is triggered by the realization that she’s having a third child. All of sudden she’s concerned about how she’s going to pay rent. She knows she hasn’t made anything of herself and it seems to be rubbed in her face regularly by her childhood friends. Her relationship is in shambles and she knows that she’s losing her husband to another woman. The fact that she’s raising these kids on her own and Flap is practically a side-note in her life is bearing down on her. Reality sinks in like a boulder and the calls from her mother that once were approached with dread and hesitation have changed tone, almost like a “well how did you do it with me” training course. It’s sweet, and you can tell that Aurora loves sharing her knowledge, but can’t stand the reason behind it.
On Aurora’s end, her world is turned upside down by her next door neighbor, Garrett (Jack Nicholson), a former astronaut who uses his position as a former American hero to his advantage, and has become a successful womanizing drunk for his efforts and now has his sights set on her. He isn’t sad, he isn’t depressed, he’s not haunted by anything, he simply has taken on the philosophy “I’ve worked hard, now I’m going to play hard.” When thinking about what the future will bring, Aurora’s disgusted by this behavior, but in Garrett’s case, that isn’t a concern, he’s been successful, and she approaches him with hesitant curiosity. Can she do this too? Is this something she could enjoy? Isn’t this recklessness just what she wanted her daughter NOT to do? It takes her to her 52nd birthday to realize the very simple fact of “you’re not getting any younger” and she takes the risky leap into Garrett’s arms. Not making a lot of female friends in her life, Aurora turns to her daughter to express the giddy excitement of her this schoolgirl-ish fling, and the mother-daughter relationship grows like that of high school girls having sleepovers talking about their latest run-ins with members of the football team.
The movie ends with the two women enjoying their newfound bond and living the rest of their days like the best of friends, Emma now a smart mother who errs on the side of caution, but hasn’t lost the fun side that made her so lovable in the first place, Aurora finally learning the importance of lightening up and enjoying life, and everyone’s a big happy family.
Oh wait…Best Picture nominee…hold on…Got it. Let’s kill Emma.
In a matter of moments, everything the movie was trying to achieve (and does so successfully) gets stripped away as Garrett, afraid of his relationship becoming an obligation, breaks away from Aurora and Emma suddenly gets cancer that eventually kills her. Almost as if the movie needs to wrap this up in some sort of sentimental “so what did we learn from all of this” moment, Emma is forced to lie on her death bed and take all of the unfinished blows in one smooth stride, from her failed relationship, to the resentment from her first-born child, to the nothing she’s really done with her life and et cetera ‘til it all winds down in a simple “She’s gone.”
I can’t help but treat the last half hour of Terms like the alternate ending that obviously was just thrown in there because the DVD didn’t have enough features to justify a re-release, kind of like Dodgeball where, at the end of the alternate ending, the team just loses and that’s it. It’s kind of the same, Emma just loses and the movie’s over. The sweetness and charm of “oh, what a fun evolution of character” just falls flatline and instead of feeling uplifted, I feel a bit cheated. Was the death of Emma to teach Aurora a lesson in living life to the fullest? Was this movie all about her to begin with? Is that what I’m getting from this? Because it just didn’t work for me.
This was originally an 8/10 for me, which I was surprised with because I came in expecting to be nauseous from it all. Turns out I was just nauseous about the ending half hour, and for that alone, this drops to 6 dustbusters out of 10.
I'm with ya almost note-for-note; total letdown at the end when it turns from drama to melodrama for the sake of extra Oscar kudos. I rate this one a *tiny* bit higher on my rating scale just because of the chemistry between MacLaine and Winger, and MacClaine and Nicholson, great actors at the peak of their skills.
ReplyDeleteP.S. Lovin' the blog! Looking forward to the next entry.
I'll give that to ya Mike. I felt 6 was a little harsh until I really started thinking about it. But that chemistry was pretty amazing between the two.
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