177. Terms of Endearment

Song - Geen Kind Meer (Karin Bloemen)

Movie: Terms of Endearment (James L. Brooks, 1983)

All I knew about this film was that Debra Winger dies. The famous scene where Emma Horton says her last words to her children gets to you even out of context. In context it is even more powerful, in part because even when it goes 'full weepie', the film never loses its inclination towards entertainment. By the time her mother Aurora (Shirley MacLaine) makes a big scene in the hospital, because her daughter isn't getting her painkillers on time, you should have accepted that subtlety is not the film's main intent. Brooks is as interested in telling an emotional story (succesfully!) as he is in presenting an acting and writing showcase in which every scene aims to elicit a roaring response from the audience. It fully embraces its melodramatic manipulative elements and is not coy about it. You may be on board with or not (I was, for the most part. Hard to find an excuse for the detour to New York), but the film is extremely honest about what it is. Which is also reflected in the way it sees Garret Breedlove (Jack Nicholson), an ex-astronaut seducing younger women and eventually Aurora, and Flap Horton (Jeff Daniels), Emma's husband. Both are no paragons of responsibility and decency, though one is fully open about his flaws, while the other desperately tries to keep up appearances as a good father, husband and professor. Of course the film loves Garret, while holding Flap in the deepest contempt.  

Daniels plays Flap Horton as a sort of blend of his characters in Dumb and Dumber and The Squid and The Whale. He is simultaneosly callously arrogant and shamelessly clueless. Those characteristics cancel each other out at first, allowing him to somehow come off as clumsily confident, making Emma fall for him. As things between him and his wife become more complicated, it becomes harder and harder for him to hide his true self and his cowardice. This all culminates in the best scene of the film, in which Flap and the dying Emma have to make some tough decisions about the living arrangements of their children. Flap is too prideful to admit that he can't care for them, too cowardly to admit that he doesn't really want to, and just smart enough to know that he shouldn't admit to either. Emma sees right through this and gently guides him into a decision where he can both say that that he wants to take care of the kids and let someone else actually take care of them. It's a perfectly written and acted scene, and one of the most blisterlingly humiliating moments I've seen in any film. In addition, emphasising Flap's, rather than Emma's', fear and vulnerability makes the next scene in which Emma has to say goodbye to her children, come off as less cheaply sentimental than it could have been.  

It is rare for a Best Picture winner to reserve so much more sympahty and understanding for its women than for its men. It is less rare for a Best Picture winner to look with scepticism towards the future. This is not a film that has a high opinion of the new generation. It has a whole lot more sympathy for Aurora than it has for Emma, and it builds that sympathy by letting us observe the characters and coming to the conclusion that Aurora is not needlessly uptight, but wise and right about almost everything. This is perhaps best exemplified by a sequence in the middle in which we see Emma on her way to an abandoned house to have an affair with the (by his own admission) boring and slow sadsack farmer Sam. They drive in a dull car on a tight country road to their destinaion, but before they arrive there, the film cuts to Garrret and Aurora who after having had a lunch date are now wilding out, being drunk in a sports car on the beach. The film also presents Garret and Aurora as having better sex than Emma and her lovers, and sees Aurora as more worldy then Emma, who shrieks in horror when her mum offers up abortion as a viable option.

This slightly retrograde vision would have been more annyoing if Jack Nicholson being given full freedom to be a mischievous charmer wasn't one of the most fun things in modern film. Nicholson and MacLaine got an Oscar for their roles. They are wonderfully compelling, but you never feel like this role was much of a challenge for them. Debra Winger has a much more understated and challenging role. She basically spends the whole film being a wife, mother and daughter, and has to highlight how she is evolving in each of these roles as she becomes more mature. She doesn't get any grand gestures before she ends up on her deathbed and is very much helped by her distinct voice. She got an Oscar nomination for it, as did John Lithgow (who only appears in a couple of scenes as Sam). That somehow leaves Jeff Daniels as the only one from the main cast without an Oscar nomination. I think he gives the best performance and is the best written character in the film.