A mother–daughter odyssey features Debra Winger’s perhaps-best performance
I write on this film largely for its example of a really good actress, as a sort of touchstone in my ongoing looks at film actresses. In my movie blog entries, I keep mentioning Meryl Streep as a sort of modern, still-working gold standard—not that all young actresses in their lives would try to emulate her—but there are many older notable actresses to consider. (And after all, Streep has not always set an example for everyone, if you think of her recently portraying Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister who seemed like an analogue to George Carlin’s description of Richard Nixon, as “look[ing] like he hasn’t taken a shit in a month”: the “Iron Lady” as a cement-bowels type.)
Debra Winger is another good example of a fine actress, and more on her soon.
Terms of Endearment received many Oscar wins, including for Best Picture and for directing, and for Shirley MacLaine and Jack Nicholson, the latter for supporting actor. It was the first film directed by James L. Brooks, a creative producing force behind TV’s The Mary Tyler Moore Show. It seems to me Terms is a perennial favorite among some people, a sort of modern-day (in its being both esteemed and beloved) Gone With the Wind, perhaps, and I don’t want to rain on these fans’ parade. It’s hard to believe this film is almost 30 years old, but in another way, it does seem from another time. It amounts to a sort of well-observed middlebrow, often-comic drama that took pains to meet middle-class expectations and assumptions the way the best of the Mary Tyler Moore Show–type programs did.
The film reflects its middle-class era—both in good and (maybe) less-so ways
You could say that, among the high-water 1970s sitcoms, there was the Moore strain of TV programming, which focused on middle-class issues in terms of manners, interpersonal issues, and emotional resonance with the audience, with a risk of being sentimental; the other strain was the Norman Lear shows, like All in the Family and Maude, which dealt more with political issues, social tensions, and ideas as opposed to interpersonal emotional life; the risk with these shows was, arguably, in being cynical or tasteless. Terms of Endearment shows the Moore
It could be said to reflect a period within U.S. cultural history—as does the more “pious” film Ordinary People (1980; see my July 24 entry) or the shallower Witness (1985; see my July 17 entry)—in which there was still a solid “middle” to the movie-watching audience, the middle class as had built up post–World War II and had entered a more emotionally mature/beleaguered period in the wake of the Vietnam War and with the 1970s economic shocks. This was during and following the period (1945 to about 1975) in which the government had still controlled various economic “well heads” and when unions were still widely respected and effective. Parents and adult children could watch Terms of Endearment from their various perspectives and feel it more or less spoke to them. Since the Reagan Administration (1981-88), for a host of reasons, the American middle class hasn’t been quite the same—no need to belabor the talk about this sort of thing as bandied about in the current presidential campaign. It’s really hard to say what particular kind of film would really fill Terms’ kind of role today, or even what current “marketing genre” would contain it.
In any event, I like this film for its artistry in some ways and for taking me back to what seems a simpler time, though I’ve always felt puzzled by this film in some ways. It is very well directed, in terms of its performances and in how shots are composed to allow a host of emotional interactions, comedy, etc., to play out without hyperactive editing—it is rather like Ordinary People in this regard.
Part of what has made me puzzled about it I think lies in the general-personality nature of the actresses Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger. Also, I only know the story from the film—apparently those familiar with Larry McMurtry’s novel can tell you how well the film treats the novel or not—and while the film is episodic (in a way where sometimes you don’t know how much time has suddenly elapsed unless you look at how old the kids are) and hence a little odd in its manner of flowing, once you get used to the pattern of the story, you appreciate the performances and plot vignettes within the overall story.
Some might also like its being a sort of Western-flavored story—MacLaine’s Aurora Greenway’s home is in Texas, where Winger’s Emma grows up, and Emma and her young family movie to Iowa, for starters. But I’ve always been struck by how the actors (with their typical styles and images) seem artificially inserted into a sort of Western setting as if this latter, in a way, doesn’t seem to matter much, or seems taken for granted as blurry background. For instance, Danny DeVito, who was born and raised in New Jersey and has long made Hollywood hay with a personal flavor that seems basically that of an amicable Italian American, is here with cowboy hat and Texas twang (and is named Vernon Dollard) as one of Aurora’s several suitors, and I think that’s odd.
Most to the point, Winger seems to me all the more today noticeable for having a (mild) Jewish manner in this film, and of course she looks not at all a blood relation to MacLaine’s Irish-looking Aurora
The mother–daughter relationship is a major hook
It’s been said the main actors and actresses have done fine work here, and I would agree. Even if you don’t care for (aspects of) the story terribly much, the performances are still worth a look, particularly as to how they flesh out the key family drama. I think that often a richly represented mother–daughter relationship in a film is interesting (and can be a key test of a film’s value), though I have to say that Aurora’s character strikes me as a disagreeable pain in the neck with her prim, opinionated, rather selfish ways. Even if you don’t like the character (which I don’t), MacLaine handles it well—she who in her own right can be a mannered actress (her broad, neat face and often tilting her head somewhat pixie-style have been a hallmark as far back as her first film role, in Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry [1955]).
In a way, Aurora’s and Emma’s relationship seems to me more suited to a Jewish family relationship (though some may disagree), which I say based on anecdotal observations where, especially when it comes to psychological issues that are manifested within family relations, Jewish family members seem to “live down each other’s throat” more than, say, Protestants do.
As a sort of Texas, Gentile “Jewish mother,” Aurora strikes me in such a way (you can feel “She has something coming to her…”) that, after a lot of other charming, mildly humorous, unrelated moments in the story, the point I get the one big laugh of the film is where Jack Nicholson, well fleshing out a rather two-dimensional role as a dissipated, wolfish-yet-good-hearted retired astronaut, says to Aurora on their first date at a restaurant, with his characteristic well-modulated voice, “You got me into this, [he says with chary respectfulness] so you’ll have to trust me on this one thing. I think you need a lot of drinks—[then, added with “lovingly” stabbing verve] to kill the bug that’s up your ass!”
Winger’s performance as the most lasting item of value here
This somewhat meandering, episodic multi-character study ends with a matter involving cancer that leaves some people dismissing this film as sentimental, though my main way of de-meriting it (not the film’s fault) is that the talk about cancer seems in several ways dated today (e.g., cancer is no longer so stigmatized as to need to be mentioned sotto voce). But the film’s main value is in Winger’s performance, I think.
Winger has been noted as a demanding, opinionated, sometimes difficult actress; not only her Wikipedia bio suggests this (it lists no fewer than three references on this issue, though I have not checked them out specifically), but there was a news story on her in an esteemed newspaper (The New York Times?) within the past few years discussing this component of her celebrated career. Further, in extra material on the DVD of Rachel Getting Married (2008; see my February 17 entry) director Jonathan Demme mentions the chief challenge of working with Winger. He says she very much has to discuss, or otherwise come to terms with, the “subtext” of a character, which (I speak as a layperson when it comes to acting) seems like the emotional background, maybe life-story and psychological-trope features, that enables the actor to develop his or her own emotional “skeleton” for the role. Apparently Winger can be “obsessive” (Demme’s word?) about this, and with how he was filming Rachel Getting Married, he had no time for this, and told her just to do her part, at which she blasted angrily at him. Yet her short-screen-time performance is adequate and at one point quite vivid. This is all an interesting area regarding Winger that I have a fairly rudimentary understanding of. (By the way, as an editor who feels entitled by experience to be more difficult within professional contexts than I used to strive to be, I can see her general point.)
As it happens, you don’t need to know this full well to appreciate how richly Winger inhabits the role of Emma. Her features aren’t beautiful in a sort of classic sense, and her voice, as I said, has a husky quality, but she articulates the character so precisely, in such things as her eyes seeming to follow “how the character would use her eyes” so well, and her ability to turn on a dime emotionally, or show changing emotional nuances directly to another character (actor).
This is such masterly acting that you forget that in Terms Winger, more today maybe than in 1983, seems like a Jewish young woman plunked down in unlikely fashion in a Texas family, and yet you believe she’s just the Emma you could ever know about in this story. Whether she does the novel’s Emma justice, I don’t know; but sometimes (due to short time) you just want the film to tell you the story, not necessarily the book, and this is arguably Winger’s finest performance (though I haven’t seen numerous of her other films), and would serve as a world-class lesson to film actresses today who want to do real work, rather than superhero fluff.
Coming soon:
Movie break: An elderly blue-collar racist, but no crash-test dummy: Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino (2008)
