Books, Arts & Manners: Little Big Screen

Television, like a reverse Falstaff, is not only witless in itself, but also the cause of witlessness in other fields it has contaminated: theater and, especially, film. A flagrant example of this is Terms of Endearment, a movie that, besides being a crowd-pleaser, has already won numerous awards. Written and directed by James L. Brooks, it is loosely based on a novel by Larry McMurtry, and much more tightly on Brooks’s experience as co-creator of such TV serials as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Lou Grant, and Taxi. Terms of Endearment is the thirty-year story of love, and sometimes love-hate, between Aurora Greenway and her only child, Emma, who live out a tragicomic destiny while the film rattles through farce, comedy, drama, and tragedy as Brooks understands them, always with great concentration on the audience’s anatomy: ribs to be tickled, sides to be split, eyes to be drenched, hearts to be broken—and carefully mended. A more calculating and manipulative movie would be hard to imagine, and yet there is a kind of innocence, too. Brooks seems to be the sort of con-man who cons himself into believing he is creating true art.

The film begins in Houston with a typical cabaret vignette in which young Aurora (Shirley MacLaine shot through a year’s supply of Vaseline), coming home late with her husband (heard but not seen), finds baby Emma fast asleep. With farcical hysteria, Aurora overrules her sensible husband and insists that this is crib death. She tries to climb into the crib but is prevented, again farcically, by the tightness of her skirt. So she contents herself with banging the baby’s back, which, of course, elicits howls from the baby. “Oh good!” exclaims Aurora. “That’s better!” This slapstick preamble sets the tone for much of the movie: a rather sticky symbiosis played mostly for belly laughs. Aurora, insecure under her bravado, continually tries to climb, literally or figuratively, into Emma’s bed while also soundly walloping her, ostensibly out of sheer maternal concern: Emma responds, consecutively or even concurrently, with affection, anger, vain outcries, and pity. It will be a lifelong hit-or-miss convergence.

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John Simon

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Television, like a reverse Falstaff, is not only witless in itself, but also the cause of witlessness in other fields it has contaminated: theater and, especially, film. A flagrant example of this is Terms of Endearment, a movie that, besides being a crowd-pleaser, has already won numerous awards. Written and directed by James L. Brooks, it is loosely based on a novel by Larry McMurtry, and much more tightly on Brooks’s experience as co-creator of such TV serials as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Lou Grant, and Taxi. Terms of Endearment is the thirty-year story of love, and sometimes love-hate, between Aurora Greenway and her only child, Emma, who live out a tragicomic destiny while the film rattles through farce, comedy, drama, and tragedy as Brooks understands them, always with great concentration on the audience’s anatomy: ribs to be tickled, sides to be split, eyes to be drenched, hearts to be broken—and carefully mended. A more calculating and manipulative movie would be hard to imagine, and yet there is a kind of innocence, too. Brooks seems to be the sort of con-man who cons himself into believing he is creating true art.

The film begins in Houston with a typical cabaret vignette in which young Aurora (Shirley MacLaine shot through a year’s supply of Vaseline), coming home late with her husband (heard but not seen), finds baby Emma fast asleep. With farcical hysteria, Aurora overrules her sensible husband and insists that this is crib death. She tries to climb into the crib but is prevented, again farcically, by the tightness of her skirt. So she contents herself with banging the baby’s back, which, of course, elicits howls from the baby. “Oh good!” exclaims Aurora. “That’s better!” This slapstick preamble sets the tone for much of the movie: a rather sticky symbiosis played mostly for belly laughs. Aurora, insecure under her bravado, continually tries to climb, literally or figuratively, into Emma’s bed while also soundly walloping her, ostensibly out of sheer maternal concern: Emma responds, consecutively or even concurrently, with affection, anger, vain outcries, and pity. It will be a lifelong hit-or-miss convergence.