Sisters Under the Skin

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

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."

But not to worry. What may, at first, be a commercial inconvenience will surely, in the end, turn into an artistic coup. Terms of Endearment does work off the conventions that rule more ordinary movies, but only to enrich its own singular voice. Its quirky rhythms and veering emotional tones are very much its own, and they owe less to movie tradition than they do to a sense of how the law of unintended consequences pushes us ceaselessly through the years, permitting no pause for perspective. Terms comes to at least glancing terms with almost every problem a person is likely to encounter in life, but it really has only one important piece of business in hand: an examination and resolution, in comic terms, of the relationship between a mother and a daughter. Everything else is in effect a diversionary tactic, a way of placing this brilliantly devised and disguised core of concern within the context of lifelike randomness.

As Brooks sees them, his movie's mother and daughter are actually sisters under the skin, connected not just by kinship but by subtle parallels of emotions and experience. Aurora appears initially to be no more than that familiar figure of satire, the American Mom as American Nightmare, all coy snarls and fierce demureness, while Emma, protected only by a thin skin of perkiness, seems to be her victim. "You aren't special enough to overcome a bad marriage," Aurora snaps on the eve of Emma's wedding, voicing her own fears about what might happen if she ventured outside her perfectly tended Texas house and garden. "I am totally convinced that if you marry Flap Morton tomorrow you will ruin your life and make wretched your destiny," she adds. As always with Brooks, locution is character.

But when Emma moves out, Aurora discovers that her child has no corner on inappropriate males. After Flap takes a job in Des Moines ("You can't even fail locally," cries Aurora, whose contempt for her son-in-law is her one immutable, hilarious quality), a plaintive note creeps into her obsessive phone calls to her daughter. Parent is now becoming a dependent, in need of a confidante, especially with that astronaut orbiting around her.

This is a new role for Emma, but one that she is entirely up for. Her ability to cope with each new child and all of Flap's croupy vagaries suggests that somehow even a so-so family life actually makes happy her destiny. If this were an ordinary comedy, that medium-sized irony would have been enough to satisfy its creator and send the audience home happy. But Brooks has one more question in mind. Could these two find it in themselves to reverse this role reversal one more time and arrive at a balanced acceptance of each other? Emma's illness provides the occasion for that final adjustment. Inevitably her growing weakness draws the young woman back toward childish dependency, and the need to defend her daughter against suffering summons forth Aurora's old ferocity. Whether she is questioning empty medical pieties or keeping poor Flap shaped up ("One of the nicest qualities about you is that you always recognized your weaknesses; don't lose that quality when you need it most") or bullying the nurse into administering a delayed sedative, MacLaine achieves a kind of cracked greatness, climax to a brave, bravura performance. Winger has an uncanny instinct for inhabiting a role, for implying that she knows even more about the character than words permit.

But then there are no bad performances, no slack scenes, no inattention of any kind in Terms of Endearment. The impulse in praising a film for which there are almost no analogies is to define it by what it is not, but that is really not good enough. It deserves some blunt declaration of respect and unguarded affection. Therefore, these three: no film since Preston Sturges was a pup has so shrewdly appreciated the way the eccentric plays hide-and-seek with the respectable in the ordinary American landscape; no comedy since Annie Hall or Manhattan has so intelligently observed not just the way people live now but what's going on in the back of their minds; and finally, and in full knowledge that one may be doing the marketing department's job for them, it is the best movie of the year.

--By Richard Schickel This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.