TERMS OF ENDEARMENT Directed and Written by James L. Brooks
The movie begins with anxious, ferocious Aurora Greenway (Shirley MacLaine) clambering up over the side of her baby's crib and hurling herself on the tot, hysterically convinced that she has only seconds to administer the kiss of life to her darling Emma and save her from crib death. Naturally, all she does is disturb a healthy infant's sleep. From this scene it is obvious that Terms of Endearment is a comedy.
The story ends, some three decades later, with the same mother and daughter (played from adolescence onward by Debra Winger) confronting the same issue, the possibility of the younger woman's premature death, this time a very realistic one, in a cancer ward. From this sequence it is clear that Terms of Endearment is a serious film that is trying to say something important about how people can triumph over the worst kinds of adversity.
Between that first intimation of mortality and the final acknowledgment of its certainty, Emma grows up to endure marriage with feckless, womanizing Flap Horton (Jeff Daniels) and have more children than they can afford on his itinerant teacher's pay. She manages to ignore the many opportunities life now offers to raise her feminist consciousness to that minimum daily level of awareness required for the modern woman's mental health (having an affair with the nice man down at the bank doesn't really count). This clearly means Terms of Endearment is a cautionary tract for the times, something Phil Donahue can really get behind.
But wait. What about uptight Aurora and that raffish former astronaut, Garrett Breedlove (Jack Nicholson, giving a joyously comic display of just the kind of wrong stuff that appalls and attracts her)? Merely thinking over the possibilities he presents takes some comical time. He has been living next door to Aurora for ten years before she hints that she might entertain a luncheon invitation from him. Five years later she actually accepts it. Thereupon a woman who once told an admirer not to worship her unless she deserved it plunges giddily into a relationship with a man she knows suffers that common cold of the male psyche, fear of commitment. This is, without question, the stuff of romantic comedy. Is that, finally, the way to describe this picture?
Well, no. And that, perhaps, spells trouble. According to Hollywood's favorite adage, it is impossible these days to sell a film successfully if it cannot be summarized in a single catchy line of ad copy. If this is true, then what are the guys over in marketing going to do with a movie that its own maker defines largely by negatives. "It was rarely 'Wouldn't it be great to do that?', but more often 'Better not do this,' " says Director James L. Brooks, who shared creative credit for both The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Taxi on television and who spent four years adapting Larry McMurtry's novel to the screen. How, indeed, are they going to handle the writer-director's entirely accurate description of the way his film works: "There is never a moment in the picture that takes you to the next moment or the next place. You just arrive and it seems inevitable—I hope."