FILMS… The Evening Star (1997)

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Terms of Endearment’s Aurora Greenway leaves a legacy, and closure on her life in pictures…

 

This movie sequel chronicles in celluloid the later story of the widow Aurora Greenway, her loves and her family life thirteen years on.

 

Jerry and Aurora

Arthur and Rosie

The Evening Star – Official Trailer (HD), Paramount Movies and Photos ©  Paramount Movies

 

A movie can leave a lasting impression, so sometimes you should leave the sequel well alone. Case under consideration, the Oscar Winning Best Film, Terms of Endearment (1983), with an Academy Award winning screenplay based on a novel by Larry McMurtry. Terms of Endearment was followed up 13 years later, by The Evening Star (1996), a film sequel which was a flop at the box office. Both films have some charismatic characters and Oscar-winning casts giving strong performances, but did we really need to know what happened next? Let’s look at the evidence.

Terms of Endearment told the apparently then self contained film story of the widow Aurora Greenway (Shirley MacLaine) and her tempestuous love-hate relationship with her daughter, Emma (Debra Winger) over 30 years. The film’s credible, heartwarming and poignant scenes, showed the lives of both women as they navigated their lives through good and bad times (and men), together and apart.

Emma marries a man, Flap Horton (Jeff Daniels) whom her mother dislikes and Emma then moves away. Aurora dates a succession of men including her neighbour Garrett Breedlove (Jack Nicholson). But the focus of the plot is Aurora’s at times volatile relationship with Emma, which is cut short, after Emma – now with 3 young children, Tommy, Teddy and Melanie – is diagnosed with cancer and then passes away from this illness. Aurora is supported throughout this film by her her supportive housekeeper (and friend), Rosie.

This weepie of a movie swept the board with an impressive 11 nominations at the 56th Academy Awards. It included wins for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director. It also boasted 2 nominations for Best Actress with Shirley MacLaine victorious against her co-star, Debra Winger. You at home may have agreed with this choice of Best Actress or believed that Winger deserved it… but one thing is clear this film really didn’t need a sequel.

Over a decade later, in practice, however, it sounded like a promising combination for the film sequel, The Evening Star. This film’s screenplay was based on McMurtry’s follow-up book of the same name, which focused on those surviving characters and added a few more. The film also boasted 2 Oscar winners from the original cast, as the Best Actress, Shirley MacLaine was reunited with the film’s Best Supporting Actor, Jack Nicholson. The sequel also featured the Best Supporting Oscar winner, Ben Johnson.

This feature film does not have Breedlove and Aurora living happily together in Little Rock Arkansas with a talking pet turtle voiced by Johnson, but it does have Bill Paxton (yay). Along with this cast, Paxton makes this film much more appealing than the sequel to Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001), which then repeated the ad nauseam on-off love triangle of Daniel (Hugh Grant), Mark (Colin Firth) and Bridget (Renee Zellweger) for an entire franchise (even when Grant wasn’t in the film, he was mentioned at a pivotal point in the movie). So read on to find out what does happen, and I promise you won’t always be on the edge of your seat, but you will love Bill Paxton literally chewing the scenery with the best of them.

In this 1997 film, events in the movie are set years later and the film is set between 1988 to 1993. The widow, Aurora (MacLaine) is now a guardian to her adult grandchildren, Tommy (George Newbern), Teddy (Mackenzie Astin) and Melanie (Juliette Lewis). Their father, Flap is no longer on the scene, so it’s an immediate stage exit for Jeff Daniels who had other work commitments at the time of filming.

It’s also goodbye to Debra Winger as Emma, who sadly doesn’t appear in a deus ex machina role – as seen in that travesty of a Mamma Mia (2008) sequel, Mamma Mia 2: Here We Go Again (2018) – to save the movie in a one-off appearance in flashbacks. That honour goes to Jack Nicholson who is winched into the movie with some of the best script and a bittersweet performance.

The bain of Aurora’s life is Patsy Carpenter (Miranda Richardson). Patsy was Emma’s best friend and is now a rich but unhappy Houston divorcee with an apparent need to upstage Aurora at every opportunity. Patsy seems permanently miffed Aurora got guardianship of the Greenway-Horton kids despite having a couple of estranged kids of her own. It seems Patsy’s main hobby is to irritate her BFF’s mother in life and love. Aurora’s closest friend and confidante is still Rosie (now played by, Marion Ross), her trusted housekeeper who has been at her side for nearly 40 years.

Men in Aurora’s life are her ex-partner General Hector Scott (Donald Moffat), who is always on hand to share his worldly wisdom at all times of the day and night. It’s clear this man still has loving feelings for her, and she credits him in the movie as being a father figure to her grandchildren. She is also in a flirty relationship with Pascal, a Frenchman and this niggles Hector.

We also meet for the first time, Bill Paxton as Jerry – Aurora’s counsellor and later toyboy – who comes with obvious mummy issues (tell me, just who has a scantily dressed photo of their mother from her showgirl days in their office? On a wee side note, his mother is called Lola, so I immediately have Barry Manilow’s Copacabana in my head). Her next-door neighbour from the first film, Garrett Breedlove has moved away and Arthur (Ben Johnson), a genial elderly man has moved into this home.

The Greenway-Horton kids are now all grown up and you will notice they are not played by the original child actors. Tommy still has anger issues and for the third time is residing in prison for possession. He has an active dislike for his grandmother and to her sadness, he bins those chocolate brownies she lovingly makes for him in front of her. Teddy is unmarried with a girlfriend and child that Aurora has little time and patience for, and he surreptitiously gets handouts from his grandmother, for “odd jobs”.

Melanie is not doing well at college and is sleeping with a layabout, Bruce, and he’s a man her grandmother clearly disapproves of. Melanie is like her mother and has a feisty nature and an on-off liking for Aurora. Melanie moves out to live with Bruce after her grandmother complains about him. This complaint was shared in Melanie’s bedroom, after walking in on the pair who had just made love. Later Melanie discovers Bruce with another woman, and after an unsuccessful overdose (in Patsy’s then-empty house) returns to live with her grandmother and then is wooed by him once more. Aurora blames herself for these events in her grandchildren’s lives, as she was the one who brought them up.

The perceptive Rosie notices Aurora seems down in mood, and spots a cute young counsellor, Jerry Bruckner (Bill Paxton) advertising his services in a wee poster. After fooling Aurora, she has Aurora drive her to Bruckner’s home, and then Rosie leaves Aurora to meet with him instead. Aurora firmly tells him she’s been set up and is there due to an “elaborate ruse”. Yet she sees this hot younger man therapist again (after taking his card) – after she stresses it’s a one-off appointment – and through his support, Aurora decides to put herself first in her life, find the love of her life and chronicle her life.

In time, it’s clear she has an attraction for Jerry and they go on a “date” where she flirts with him outrageously. Aurora sneaks in his bedroom window late one night, and this younger man then beds Aurora and they begin a relationship. However, it is clear this counsellor has mummy issues as he raves about his mother in quite an unhealthy manner.

Aurora also has regular spats with Patsy, who is jealous of Aurora be it in her relationship with Melanie or with Jerry. Patsy regularly turns up, like a nemesis to undermine her in Aurora’s good times and to relish in her bad times, and the women clearly hate each other. Patsy tries to find out about Aurora’s relationship with Jerry and then she beds him. Aurora discovers her belt under Jerry’s bed and confronts them in a wonderful scene. Aurora confides in Hector and Rosie throughout the movie, both support her unconditionally as she chronicles her life and aims to put herself first and find the love of her life. Rosie also encourages her to enjoy the present.

Throughout the film, Shirley MacLaine shows Aurora in a rounded way. She is seen in full gusto with Aurora at her bitchy best, after both Hector and Patsy – and her yellow belt – are chided on their alternative fashion sense in some pithy put-downs. Her beautifully crafted confrontation of those two characters who let her down, after she invites Jerry and Patsy for lunch wearing this belt, and then casually asks how long they’ve been “fucking” is priceless and this is swiftly followed up with a cutting comment to Jerry (and his mother).

Scenes with her on-screen family show her character’s unconditional love and support, be it in her relationship with Melanie or Tommy. Her relationship with Melaine is a clear mirror image of her relationship with her daughter. Melanie moves away to LA with her boyfriend who had previously cheated on her (with her grandmother giving her a return ticket before she leaves), and he hurts her in this way again.

In the then grandmother and granddaughter’s long-distance chats that follow this after both women reach out to the other, and discuss men over the phone, you may remember her mother Emma also did this with her discussions of Flap and Garrett in the previous film and this strengthens their relationship.

As for Tommy, she tells him, quite honestly that she’s added a “file” in his box of Brownies during a prison visit. She still visits Tommy in jail, despite his continued animosity. She then tells him how hurt he makes her feel after he bins her homemade brownies and with this “file”, she finds a way to Tommy’s heart and supports him after he leaves prison.

Jack Nicholson pops up 1 hour and 40 minutes into the just over 2 hours of movie, as Garrett Breedlove, her one-time astronaut love interest. MacLaine’s scenes with Nicholson are a constant delight,t as we discover – with surprise – what this bachelor and womaniser did next, as it seems he married and had a kid. She asks “How much younger is your wife?,” and Garrett grins that Nicholson devilish smile and says “Much younger”. He then warns after Aurora shares her dream to meet the one that there are “not many shopping days til Christmas”.

Aurora’s bittersweet story is one in the foreground, but it is later balanced with much sadder storylines from other cast members. These dramatic scenes are like Terms of Endearment‘s scenes of life and loss. These scenes from the elderly characters, Rosie, Hector, Aurora and Arthur add poignancy and potency to the movie and each of these talents gives a solid performance.

In the film’s opening scenes, Rosie lightly comments to Aurora that Arthur’s grass never has a chance to grow, as we meet a man sitting on a motorised lawnmower. It’s implied he’s always there to greet these ladies as a neighbour or as a friend. You believe this man – in a quiet but measured role from Ben Johnson – is another potential love interest for Aurora, but he has other intentions.

In time his motivations are revealed – in Rosie’s conversation with Aurora – that his character loves Rosie and wants to marry her. This lifelong spinster is taken aback as she’s never had a man say this to her before. Her scene where she hands in her notice to marry him is reassuring for Aurora, as Rosie adds she will be living next door. After they marry, there are poignant scenes with Johnson and MacLaine. These are amongst the strongest and most effective scenes from the movie. Their shared love for Rosie is seen and felt as she finds out that Rosie is dying.

Sadly, this quiet, measured and supportive role both on screen and off was Johnson’s movie swan song. This film was dedicated to this actor, who passed away before the film was released. Arthur shows Aurora that it’s never too late to find love in your life, be it with the girl next door, for a good friend and confidante, an ex-lover, a nemesis but now a friend, or your family. The film’s message from his character comes to the fore in those later scenes, as we see Aurora’s appreciation for this knowledge in her later years. It is like the Evening Star that Garrett Breedlove talks of which “shines first, shines brightly and shines the longest”, as we with Aurora, learn about this never-ending legacy.

 

Weeper Rating: :-(  :-(  :-(  :-(  :-(  :-( /10

Handsqueeze Rating: :-)  :-)  :-) /10

Hulk Rating:   ‎  ‎  ‎‎  ‎   ‎/10

 

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Shades of Shane Blogathon 2023 No 10

This post was added to Hamlette’s Soliloquy’s Shades of Shane Blogathon. Ben Johnson stars in The Swarm and Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  Bill Paxton in Tales from the Crypt, Titanic and Weird Science. Donald Moffat in Columbo, The Gift of Love and Dallas. George Newbern in Family Ties and Adventures in Babysitting / A Night on the Town.  Jack Nicholson stars in Goin South, Terms of Endearment and Mars Attacks.  Mackenzie Astin in Mad Men and Hotel. Marion Ross in Happy Days. Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment and The Apartment.

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