‘Terms of Endearment’ IS NOT a Melodrama

Terms of Endearment has a lasting reputation as a melodramatic, emotionally-manipulative chick flick. This is a film that grossed over $100 million (an even more significant benchmark in the early 80’s) and won five major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay for James L. Brooks, Best Actress for Shirley MacLaine and Best Supporting Actor for Jack Nicholson). If Nicholson’s performance as astronaut playboy Garrett Breedlove had been shuffled into the lead actor category (I didn’t do an exact minute count, but I’m fairly certain he appears in as much if not more of the film than Anthony Hopkins did for his Best Actor winning performance in Silence of the Lambs) Terms of Endearment would join that film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and It Happened One Night in the rarefied Big Five Sweep club. 

But Terms of Endearment is now oft-cited as one of the worst Best Picture winners and an example of the Oscar’s fleeting fascination with family dramas instead of “Important” issues. 1979’s Kramer vs. Kramer and 1980’s Ordinary People also make worst best picture lists, at least in part because they “unjustly” beat out Apocalypse Now and Raging Bull for those top prizes. Those also-rans are undeniably powerful films that have had a lasting impact on cinema, but is part of what made their “worthiness” of the title Best Picture their focus on men? [See also Shakespeare in Love’s much-derided win over Saving Private Ryan].  

The muddled legacy of Terms of Endearment, and the seeming unlikeliness that such a picture would find such box office and awards success today, supports my fear that movies focused on women are seen as inherently less important and respectable. When I was watching Terms of Endearment this week, all traces of its reputation fell from my mind as I fell into simply enjoying watching the film. It is incredibly easy to be swept into caring about the lives of Aurora Greenway (Shirley MacLaine) and her daughter Emma (Debra Winger). Their mother-daughter dynamic is very recognizable: they are eternally frustrated with each other but nevertheless co-dependently needful of each other’s love, and can switch from delightfully supportive of the other person’s happiness to cruel about the other person’s problems and back in seconds. These relatable characters are made alive by incredible performances, and the film is generously sprinkled with the winning dialogue (“I don’t think I was treating her badly.” “Then you must be from New York.”) and memorable moments (Emma and Aurora instantaneously making up over the phone after Aurora has boycotted Emma’s wedding) that create that undeniable feeling of  “movie magic.” 

For a so-called melodrama, Terms of Endearment‘s plot is actually quite true to life. Emma and her husband Flip (Jeff Daniels) move to Iowa for Flip’s stalled academic career; their relationship falters as they struggle with money and child rearing and both take on affairs. Aurora has an opposites-attract fling with her self-satisfied cad of a neighbor (Nicholson), who eventually shows surprising tenderness toward her. These are the kinds of things that happen all the time in the lives of people we know but are hardly ever seen in movies. Emma’s affair with her banker Sam (John Lithgow) is presented as two people filling emotional and physical needs outside of their marriages, not as an epic romance that cannot be because of the constraints of society a la Anna Karenina and countless other works of fiction. 

How is that melodrama? And how refreshing is it to see a wife and mother having extramarital sex be portrayed sympathetically? It’s even more refreshing to see a sexual relationship between two fifty-somethings treated as normal and—get this—sexy. They’re even played by actors ROUGHLY THE SAME AGE (contra Jack Nicholson’s next Oscar-winning romance with a woman a quarter-century younger than him in As Good as It Gets). 

I’m guessing that the accusations of sentimentality mainly come about from the film’s third act, in which Emma discovers she has terminal cancer and dies. There are some very emotionally fraught scenes, like the Oscar clip reel-bait in which Aurora takes out her pain and frustration at watching her daughter die by screaming at the nurses that Emma needs a shot of pain medication. The most famous scene in Terms of Endearment may be Emma saying goodbye to her children when she knows she is dying. The scene does not hold back: her oldest acts sullen and distant, her younger son cannot hold back his sobs, and Emma finds the strength to say the exact right thing to each of them (including: get haircuts). I don’t think the choice to share such an emotionally raw scene with the audience should be dismissed as “manipulative.” It’s certainly no more manipulative than the countless examples in fiction where people just miss their chance to say goodbye. 

Desperately attempting to find closure with a dying loved one is something that most people experience at some point in their life. Presenting a common problem with unflinching honesty is in fact THE OPPOSITE of melodrama. As such, I’m pretty sure that “Terms of Endearment is a sentimental melodramatic manipulative tear-jerker” is just another way of saying, “It can’t be good if girls like it.”

---

Robin Hitchcock is an American writer living in Cape Town, South Africa who would like to get one look at Des Moines before she dies.