Terms of Endearment

TERMS OF ENDURANCE

Terms of Endearment isn’t but a fractionally more adult Mary Tyler Moore and no accident: James L. Brooks, the movie’s writer-director, was one of the creative forces behind the series. What he tries to do in Terms is use comedic dialogue and situations to bridge familial estrangement with the melodramatics of dying. Central to this tearjerker is the on-going cat fights between mother Shirley MacLaine and daughter Debra Winger. Aside from Winger smoking pot and marrying a man Shirley doesn’t approve of—proven conveniently right when he turns out to be a philanderer—there doesn’t seem to be much to have nearly thirty years worth of virtual bitch slaps over. (Apparently true neither actor liked one another on set.) If Winger is exasperated by Shirley’s daily long distance calls, why doesn’t she buy a cheap answering machine to screen them? Of course, had she, or had she removed the pettiness they mutually engage in with a simple “fuck off, Mother,” there wouldn’t be much of a movie. Some early-on amusement for us—Shirley’s a revirginated, blond-raspberry-haired, Sakowitz-dressed widow living on the fringe of Houston’s poshy River Oaks, a caricature of her career-long condition of exasperating super-ordinariness and then we pay dearly for it when poor slob Winger is diagnosed with the big C. The assumption is mother and daughter, unable to reconcile, have to endure terminitis to forgive and unify, and I won’t say the misfortune is false—we all have personal stories about what grave illness of a loved one does to us—but Brooks, more than novelist Larry McMurtry who created the quarreling twosome, delights in trapping us in the ransom of clichés bolstered by antics and one-liners. I’ve heard the word “original” coming from the blurbsters. Not: Brooks lifted David Lloyd’s “Chuckles Bites the Dust” episode of Mary Tyler Moore, which took shock & repressed grief and made them healthy; the laughs Brooks gets in Terms don’t release enough endorphins for runny-nosed Winger and audience victims. More embarrassing is the movie being sickeningly implicit about the hopelessness of cancer. Oh shit, it’s way beyond that: Winger is explicitly resigned to her fate, and everyone else on set reponds accordingly. A disease no one discusses, the dumb-dumb doctor doesn’t do much other than give instructions for Winger to have periodic pain-numbing shots, but he doesn’t have much interest in, either, because in her worst scene Shirley has to scream at the callous nurses to give Winger an overdue injection. The illness isn’t as sanitized as Ali MacGraw’s in Love Story, nor as moving as Winger’s bout in Shadowlands, but Brooks aims to win for her the Miss Congeniality prize. It went to Shirley in the form of a conciliatory Oscar. The cruddy pop psychology in Terms of Endurance is women crying over bitch-outs causing cancer.

Shirley’s decision to reprise her character in the deathquel The Evening Star doesn’t really need any more critical flogging, but I’m going to whip her anyway. Hating the first round, and probably hating it even more because so many loved sobbing their asses off. Yes, I did savor her peevishness, not unlike how I did in Postcards from the Edge, and I liked how she couldn’t thwart Jack Nicholson’s improvised stunts. (No one believes his Breedlove could ever get it up for her.) In Evening Star, she’s reiterating how wrong she is for the part, exacerbated by an excess of Grandma curls. When Juliette Lewis appears, tramped up to suggest a specific piece of Arkansas trailer park trash, there’s a pickup in watchability for the huge effort she makes not to extend what she’s famous for being—the Natural Born Killers psycho bitch. Miranda Richardson, an actress of depth and weight, is irredeemable as a rich Houstonian divorcée; in order to play one, an affinity for vacuousness is needed and sans the Hillary-style hairdo. Her belt, however, is authentic River Oaks superficial. Won the 1996 Stinkers Bad Movie award for Worst Sequel. Directed by Robert Harling.

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ralphbenner@nowreviewing.com