From the Archives: Coming to ‘Terms’ With the Predicament of Life

Life is what happens while you’re making other plans,” John Lennon wrote, and in “Terms of Endearment” (selected theaters), it does just that. In this pungent and beautifully observed film, the most completely satisfying of this and many another year, life is fascinating, tender, hilarious, catastrophic, healing, warm and, in the main, a faintly absurd predicament in which to find oneself.

We have a front-row seat for one of the damnedest, cut-on-the-bias mother-and-daughter relationships to warm a screen. We pick it up at intervals, from the moment the capricious and determined Aurora Greenway (Shirley MacLaine) hovers over her newborn Emma through the high and low points of their next 30-odd years. The essence of their relationship is summed up in two looks that pass between mother and daughter, one at the beginning, one at the end of the picture.

But catch her motherly advice the night before gangly, teenage Emma (Debra Winger) is going to be married to Flap Horton (Jeff Daniels), a boy with a comic/handsome face and the soul of a perpetual graduate student. “You are not special enough to overcome a bad marriage,” Aurora pronounces calmly to her daughter. But that doesn’t deter Emma, and it’s no surprise to the quiet Flap, who is under few illusions about his position in this well-to-do Houston family, “Your mother hates your husband,” he tells his new wife quite correctly, “and she only holds you in medium esteem.”

In one stroke, writer/director/producer James L. Brooks sets the tone for his extraordinary picture, which is both faithful to and bravely inventive with Larry McMurtry’s literate and singular novel. The film bristles with the best dialogue in memory and with effortless transitions over its broad period of time. It deals with the absolute real stuff of life from new and sometimes dazzling angles. And each time you think you know where a character or a situation will take you, it pulls the rug out from under you.

While Emma is still a teenager, with braces on her teeth and legs akimbo, she is lollygagging on the front lawn of her widowed mother’s suburban house, watching a genuine astronaut move in next door. We all know what will happen. Mama and the astronaut ...

Ha.

Garrett Breedlove, the astronaut, is Jack Nicholson, presenting the flip (if not the down) side of “The Right Stuff’s” heroes. Beer-bellied, raffish, deeply allergic to commitment, the newest buzzword, his shark’s grin seems to precede him into a room. His celebrity and a breathtaking line have stood him in good stead with women up to now. Why not? As an astronaut, there are only 105 others in the world to have done what he’s done. But it’s beginning to wear a little thin now, and one of the film’s great mosaics is Nicholson’s portrayal of Garrett, crude, courtly, courageous, faintly desperate yet entirely endearing all at the same time.

Nicholson’s is actually a supporting role in this family album and brilliant as he is, the film’s twin beacons are the performances of Winger and MacLaine.

Aurora may be the more difficult role, since she hovers right on the edge of impossibility. In terms of having her own way in life, this is a woman born with a silver bit in her teeth. She presides over a stable of lovesick admirers (including Danny DeVito of “Taxi”), with the control of a sorority housemother. After Flap gets his professorship and has the temerity to move his wife and growing family away to Des Moines, Aurora rules by long-distance phone. She masters the emergency-interrupt to break into Emma’s private calls with the imperiousness of a teenager.

But in the Aurora-Emma equation, those who see Aurora as a monster aren’t looking closely at the sinews between this remarkable pair, or at the plain truth that this daughter is as crazy about her critical, difficult mother as her mother is about Emma. They ignore the real communication between the two, which has absolutely nothing to do with the telephone. That MacLaine can give us every one of Aurora’s facets and still make her infinitely compassionate is the measure of the actress’ art.

Emma is one of life’s naifs, but a sturdy one. Somehow, with a widowed mother whose natural impulse is to overpower and with very few examples to learn from, Emma turns out to be a stone natural as a mother. (The breezy conversational tone all the way through “Terms” between this mother and her sons is part of the picture’s perfect pitch.)

She manages to be a pretty memorable wife as well. In Winger’s hands, Emma has an openness and an almost unconscious sensuality that are enchanting. The few mannerisms Winger had in “Urban Cowboy” have vanished; she now inhabits every scene she is in with a perception and a believability that are extraordinary.

Under the film’s surface preoccupation with babies and jobs, lovers and losses, innocence and its erosion is the continuing thread of life itself, which is one of McMurtry’s and Brooks’ reassurances.

The physical details of the picture, over this dizzying 30 years, are brilliant. Polly Platt’s production design lets us know everything about these characters, particularly Aurora, a slave, if there ever was one, to change in decor. (Harold Michelson was the art director.)

Ben Nye Jr.’s makeup design seems to be one of the film’s true miracles. The changes come so subtly they are almost subliminal. No small part of the film’s visual wit comes from Kristi Zea’s dead-accurate costumes, and Andrzej Bartkowiak’s camerawork is lyrical and sunny, an interesting contrast to his work on “Prince of the City” and “The Verdict.” Richard Marks’ deft editing carries us through these enormous period leaps effortlessly, as does the original music of Michael Gore. (The original music of the various eras, including Aurora’s passion for show tunes, which she passes on to her daughter, is another carefully chosen texture of the picture.)

John Lithgow is superlative as Emma’s insightful banker friend, and Jeff Daniels is appealing, against all odds, as Emma’s husband, Flap.

There are a few moments where director Brooks goes for the broad laugh (Emma’s on-campus ambush of Flap is one of those scenes) and one where he goes against nature (extremely pregnant women don’t flop down, comfortably, on their backs but on their sides.) But these are minor notes in a heroic work or direction and adaptation. In one leap, Brooks has established himself as a major presence, a filmmaker of humor, humanity and substance.

Running time: 2 hours, 9 minutes,

MPAA-rated,PG (parental guidance suggested).