Review – Terms of Endearment

This is the relationship many women of a certain age secretly think they have with their adult daughters. Our heroine (Debra Winger) has an uneasy relationship with her mother (Shirley MacLaine). We follow the characters through the twists and turns of their lives: the slow degeneration of the daughter’s marriage and the budding romance between the mom and her next-door neighbor, an ex-astronaut (Jack Nicholson). Usually I’d find a story structure as episodic as this off-putting, but here for some reason it worked for me. Some of the dialogue and plot points come across as contrived. But otherwise the only real defect here is the excessive sentimentality, particularly toward the end. Mildly amusing