Word: emma
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
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...
...play's major motive force, makes the production worth squirming for. Shepard's tools for inducing that Squirm aren't much subtler than the "starving class" metaphor of the title, which, despite numerous references in the dialogue, never surpasses the self-conscious (they're emotionally starving, you see). Emma (Molly White) the younger of the two gawky adolescents, is having her first period, as the mother constantly reminds father and brother to excuse her behavior. Wesley (Steven Gutwillig), her brother, urinates on a heap of Emma's painstakingly drawn posters. Shepard isn't one for the soft touch. His intention...
White avoids this trap the best, enabling the consistently wacky pre-teen Emma to relate her personality so other characters--parents, for instance, Gutwillig as Wesley has a harder time. Less defined to start with, his character progresses a lot further through the plot's various unbelievabilities than his sister, and he and Bernstein, excellent by themselves, rarely convey the impression of mother and son. Most of the stiffness and bad timing evaporate once Norris as Weston comes onstage; the strongest personality of the four, he not only dominates the plot but brings most of the dramatic momentum with...
...Kingsley (Gandhi) plays Robert, Patricia Hodge is Emma, and Jeremy Irons is their friend, and they are brisk, expert and rather too much of an ensemble. There is not enough contrast of tone between them. The fault may be not of their making, since they are being asked to play theatrical conventions instead of people. David Jones' direction reinforces the problem: elegantly geometrical in its calculation of cuts and angles, it is uninterested in the higher calculus of the emotions. This all serves the text but not the irresistible demands of the movie medium for emotional intensity. Film finally...