Word: daughters
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...