Well, perhaps I am not that old (it depends who you ask),but I am a bit of a curmudgeon when it comes to this film. I know that TONS of people love this movie and it won the Best Picture Oscar, but it left me cold. In fact, the only part of the movie I really liked was the bizarre scene where Jack Nicholson was driving along the beach (you just have to see it). I never really felt much about the rest of the film. So, as folks weeped during the sequences where Deborah Winger played a woman battling cancer, I didn't particularly care. The film felt, to me, manipulative and I didn't think much about the characters or the mother-daughter relationship. But, as I said, I am a curmudgeon...and I also didn't like "Steel Magnolias", either. It isn't that I won't watch 'disease films' (after all, I am a cancer survivor),but not ones where I am not invested in the folks in the film. Sorry, but that's just my two-cents worth.

Terms Of Endearment is a story of what happens when life does not go as planned and how you deal with it. In one way or another we are flawed humans, but most of us can rise to the occasion if the situation calls for it. It gained an Oscar at last for Shirley MacLaine and a second for Jack Nicholson though in the Supporting character category.

The story stretches out over a 30 year period and it starts with the death of MacLaine's husband early on and she's left to raise her daughter on her own. As the daughter who grows up to be Debby Winger the two fight constantly. She really doesn't approve of her choice of husband Jeff Daniels who is a struggling academic who in the course of the movie has several teaching positions and rises slowly in his profession. Not fast enough for MacLaine. She reminds me of Madge Wallace the mother-in-law of Harry S. Truman who never thought her son-in-law would amount to anything. She died in the White House just before the Trumans left for Independence permanently.

Winger has three children, but she's beset by doubts about Daniels's infidelity as he does have nubile coeds all about. Both of them misread signals about each other and MacLaine's hectoring doesn't help.

As for Shirley, her neighbor is a retired astronaut Jack Nicholson who is still looking for space groupies. He's an unlikely candidate to thaw MacLaine out, but they find out they have more in common than they think. And Nicholson has more character than we first suspect.

Terms Of Endearment is a film that places people who are very much like the people who pay to see this film in real universal situations we can all understand. Not hard to understand how this became such a critical and popular hit.

Terms Of Endearment won for Best Picture in 1983 and Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay for James Brooks. It got a flock more nominations as well. It's an enduring classic and will remain so.

The finale with MacLaine is sublimely beautiful.

Emma (Debra Winger) has had to deal with her widowed mother Aurora (Shirley MacLaine) since the beginning. Aurora is needy, wild, flirtatious and really the love of her life. Hard-partying former astronaut Garrett Breedlove (Jack Nicholson) moves in next door. Emma marries Flap Horton (Jeff Daniels) despite Aurora's warnings and her backhanded insults. Aurora doesn't even go to the wedding. The marriage gets into trouble and she has an affair with Sam Burns (John Lithgow).

Terms of Endearment is utterly endearing. Debra Winger is hilarious and I love her relationship with MacLaine. I just love Winger yelling at her kids and then quickly switches back. A lot of praise has to be given to director/writer James L. Brooks. This is funny, touching and a real tear jerker. Winger talking to her kids on her death bed is incredibly heart breaking.