Nominees: The Big Chill, The Dresser, The Right Stuff, and Tender Mercies
He Said: Terms of Endearment, Or how I learned to worry about everything, and almost cry...almost
Not sure what to
expect with this one, I had heard of it before but didn't really know
anything about it. Turns out to be a chick flick. The movie basically
follows the life of a relatively normal person, Emma Horton, living
in Houston from birth and accelerates fairly quickly through her
life. I think the idea of the film was to show us what every day
lives are all about, but it was very disjointed and with some poor
writing in parts and to me did not have a very good flow.
The movie starts off with Emma as a
baby and we see the start of her relationship with her mother
(Aurora), which is problematic and difficult most of the time, even
at this young age. The movie then jumps to her as a pre-teen with the
death of her father and demonstrates her mother's general
psychological instability and her neediness and reliability on her
daughter, a theme carried on throughout the film. After her pre-teen
moment we jump into the teen years briefly and then spend the rest of
the movie in her adult years from getting married to having kids,
marriage strife and infidelity, and so on. As I said earlier, the
movie seems disjointed mainly because it spends a few minutes on her
at this age, then jumps quickly to something else then something
else. Even when she is an adult it jumps around and the only way of
knowing that the movie has moved on to further years is seeing older
children around her, at which point we ask if these are her kids or
just some other kids? Perhaps using a subtitled date would help with
the disjointed feeling. Ultimately I think they should have spent a
bit more time in these various time points to flesh things out a bit
more and cut out some of the time spent on her adult life and her
mother's life, parts that don't really move the film along and don't
add to the character development at all.
In regard to character development,
the characters are basically who they are from the beginning with
very little change as they age and experience new things. The mother
is still as jaded and untrustworthy at the start as at the end, the
husband is still a cheater who doesn't feel responsible for his
actions. The crazy astronaut neighbour is still a playboy, with
perhaps a bit more loving for Aurora at the end. Which reminds me,
how did he know where they were at the end? He stopped seeing the
mother romantically and hadn't spoken to her in years and all of the
sudden he appears in Nebraska out of the blue. Maybe someone called
him to tell him but with all the disjointedness and jumping around in
the movie they may have glossed over this small detail.
Jeff Daniels plays
the part of Emma's husband and he does a decent job of playing the
part. I learned that Jeff Daniels hasn't changed his hair since 1980,
I guess he liked the look and went with it. He certainly had a large
fall from this to Dumb and Dumber, but that's the way things go
sometimes.
There is quite a large chunk of the movie focused on
Aurora and her love affair with the smarmy womanizing neighbour
astronaut (played by Jack Nicolson). One nice thing about this
relationship is that it has equally aged male and female actors and
roles which is a nice change to see rather than the movies of the
past 20 years or so featuring older men with much younger women. In
addition to the focus on this love affair, throughout the movie we
see Aurora surrounded by various men friends who are just trying
desperately to become romantically involved with her. I remember
thinking how odd it was to invite one's doctor over for you birthday
dinner, especially when the dinner was just a bunch of men. Another
odd Aurora moment is after finally having had sex with the astronaut
she calls up Emma to tell her all about it. Um...ew. How would you
like your mother calling you to tell you about her sex life. Not so
sure what that was all about, perhaps relief after all those years
after the death of her husband finally getting satisfaction again did
something to her. She was certainly in desperate need of some female
friends, that's for sure. I know we should all have the birds and the
bees talk with our parents, but when your mom is telling you about
her renewed sex life with the neighbour, I think this skips over the
too much information area and right into oh my god that is disgusting
please stop talking now...please.
Thinking about the movie, perhaps
how we get there isn't the point. Maybe it doesn't matter how much
the movie jumps around from one area to the next and one decade to
another with no explanation in-between. Maybe what matters is the
people getting through their lives and what happens in the end. I
don't know, I am just speculating here, but to me I feel the movie
would have done better to flesh out some of these details, that way
we would feel closer ties to them. Furthermore, the film spends so
long on seemingly pointless scenes that if we only were to get a
flavour of things and move on one wouldn't expect to spend that much
time on an individual scene. Frankly I didn't like any of the
characters, I found them curious and odd and enjoyed watching from an
experimental point-of-view to see what happened next to them like
bugs in a jar, but otherwise I didn't give a damn. So I guess I
didn't understand what the director and writer were trying to
achieve.
Terms of
Endearment is simply okay, nothing more nothing less. It has its
moments and at the end yes even I, the Grinch, had a moment of nearly
tearing, nearly. It won the Oscar for many areas including best
picture, two for acting, writing, and directing, not to mention
numerous other nominations it received. I don't know how it won the
Oscar for best picture but I have not seen the other nominees (The
Big Chill, The Dresser, The Right Stuff, and Tender Mercies) to be
able to compare, but I am damn sure something else was made this year
that was better. Even Return of the Jedi with the stupid Ewoks had
more interest than this movie. I looked up some 1983 films and
Scarface was made that year, a magnificent gem, admittedly it is
ultraviolent and the Academy tends to steer clear of those, but how
did Pacino not win for that one, he did an amazing job as usual. I
think Terms of Endearment had a good overall plot but the execution
was lacking and it ended up being overly dry and boring.
So there you have
it, a mostly boring, slightly emotional movie about a woman's life.
If you missed it, you won't actually miss anything.
Next up Amadeus,
the life and time of mister Mozart,apparently with
some graphic violence I hear. Should be interesting...
