Delayed Reaction: Terms of Endearment

The Pitch: Let's try the Ordinary People formula again but focus more on the women.

The story of a very close mother and daughter over several years.

My motivations are transparent enough. It was Oscar season so I opted to watch a Best Picture winner (Note: I'm always working off a backlog of these, so it'll be May or something before you see this. Oh well). Of course, I'm a hypocrite, because I like to make a point about how rarely the Best Picture winner is the best movie in a given year -at the top of my head, where is The Right Stuff for 1983?. Yet, here I am, opting for a past Best Picture winner rather than digging into 1983 to find what was actually the "best" movie of the year. I'm a student of the Oscars. I look at the winners and nominees more as a way to reflect the time in which it won.

This is what I learned about 1983.1) We haven't done right by Debra Winger. Is there a reason her A-list career didn't last longer? 2) Shirley MacLaine's Aurora really set the template for helicopter mothers that have dominated TV for the last 20 years. If she played that role for straight comedy, she'd fit perfectly in the stable of mothers in ABC family sitcoms right now. 3) Has any great actor skirted by with as little range as Jack Nicholson? Don't get me wrong. I love Jack Nicholson, but he's a 3 time Oscar winner (12 time nominee) who got by playing the "Jack Nicholson character" a significant amount of the time. He sure didn't disappear in his role in Terms of Endearment. 4) I must've seen an abbreviated cut of the film. John Lithgow got an Oscar nomination for this, and he's barely in it. I guess Oscar voters never change that much. Jeff Daniels plays an asshole husband, so voters ignored him because he was an asshole. Even though he was a really great asshole. Lithgow plays a sweet, nervous guy and people swooned for him. Well, maybe not swooned.

This was a decent movie. The story is more of a survey of the two women's lives than a deep dive. I feel like whenever I got comfortable in a certain point in time, it would jump a few years. I suppose that's necessary for the overall story, but it didn't end up having the cumulative effect that I'd hoped for. There were a few moments that were perfect though. The opening scene with Debra Winger's character as a baby is brilliant. That sets the tone as well as any movie I've seen. The famous Shirley MacClaine freak out in the hospital is famous for a reason. It is Oscar Bait 101 though. The scene when Debra Winger on her deathbed tells her oldest son that she knows he loves her and he shouldn't worry about it years later that he didn't say it is transparently emotionally manipulative but worked perfectly nonetheless. That really is the movie in a nutshell: it's a bunch of really fantastic individual moments with an OK story in between. MacLaine and Winger are excellent in it regardless.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend