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I have to wonder why I like this movie so much, and so much more than other movies that maybe have similar plots. Some people have accused it of being a drawn-out TV-movie of the week tearjerker, Pauline Kael said its calculated humanity was infuriating... I don't think that this is true. James Brooks, who wrote and directed this great film, was also responsible for "The Mary Tyler Moore Show", and, for this alone, I would trust him completely. "Terms of Endearment" is a movie where the energy absolutely comes from the characters and not from ideas, or from ideas about how the characters are going to necessarily react. Brooks is as expressive about emotions as any other director might be, but he is generous in a way that a lot of others couldn't possibly be, and this is a very valuable quality for him. Maybe it's because no one scene is weighted any differently than another: Brooks is as eager about the "little" things as he is the big emotions; furthermore, he is respectful about the discretion in handling the highly emotional scenes. I remember equally vividly the scene at the Holiday Inn pool as I do the dinner party as I do the deathbed scene as I do the argument at the supermarket. In most "life-affirming" movie what gets remembered are the scenes where the characters tell each other how life has passed them by, or how beautiful life is, or else there is some fake-ironic ending to demonstrate one of these points. There is such a complete lack of this in "Terms of Endearment". The only observation we get is Aurora's, right after her daughter has died, and its means in the ways it makes me cry are unique to almost all other deathbed scenes: her acknowledgment that the idea of Emma's death being a relief was nothing compared to the reality of being so devastatingly unprepared for it. This is not an emotion that you can think out while sketching on paper... It's such a complexly unexpected thing for someone to say. And Brooks doesn't let us intrude on these two any longer than Emma's doctor does when he talks to her about her kids. Someone once said that life is what happens to you while you are planning for it. Well, this is an attitude that Brooks shares here. Because he is not a director driven by ideas, he can actually have characterization happen by itself, rather than imposing it, plot incidents alike. I think Brooks was attracted to Larry McMurtry's novel because it actually was life-affirming, even in Emma's death. I suppose I spent about 2-3 minutes crying at this movie - and every time, it's a watershed... Proportionately, that's pretty accurate. Out of 132 minutes, 2-3 spent crying might scale pretty closely to how much sadness we could encounter in our real lives. And the rest of the movie is every bit as vital. Of course, the acting contributes largely to the accomplishment. I can't visualize one of the main actors in a role without quickly thinking of "Terms...". Partly that's because the quality of the way the characters were drawn... And feeling each scene out on its own terms, the actors can feel boundless, and there's joy in that. Even when Debra Winger was dying, she gets some variety. There have been parts in this character that Jack Nicholson, whose charisma is both charming and funny, hasn't been able to shake. And Shirley MacLaine, whose scene by the nurses' station can effortlessly make you laugh and cry at the same time. This kind of scene sort of goes along with the idea that "I guess you had to be there"; how else could you feel such different things unless you felt like you got to know the characters at your own pace. After I saw "As Good As It Gets", which I thought was very good, I just think that James Brooks feels very abundantly and that he never uses his judgment against people, but rather for a special dispensation of his deep wisdom. The reputation of "Terms of Endearment" has gone downhill since it won all those Oscars in 1984, and that, combined with a desire to point out that it is no way typical, is why I think it deserves special mention.
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