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“This just shows the diversity of McMurty's talent! Great read!”
Jay D wrote this review Thursday, October 29 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“The film is about the thirty-year mother-daughter relationship between two women: stubborn brunette Emma (Debra Winger) and her devoted, possessive, blond, widowed mother Aurora Greenway (Shirley MacLaine).
Wendy B wrote this review Thursday, April 30 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
Before the opening credits, the film portrays Aurora as a worried, new mother who checks on her baby every five minutes in the middle of the night and imagines the worst. In the baby's bedroom, she stares at the crib of her infant daughter and imagines crib death: "Rudyard, she's not breathing." She shakes her baby out of its quiet and peaceful sleep, causing the infant to wail — and Aurora to claim: "That's better."
Later, as a young adult, Emma rebels against Aurora's attentions, and against her advice marries literature student Flap Horton (Jeff Daniels). As the independent-minded, individualistic Emma is getting in the car with her family to move from Houston, Texas to Des Moines, Iowa, away from her managing mother, she tells her:
“ Mama, that's the first time I stopped hugging first. I like that. ”
As they suffer from unpaid bills (in a wrenching supermarket scene, young Teddy (Huckleberry Fox) hands back a Clark candy bar to the checkout clerk with a simple: "I don't need it"), young mother Emma also discovers that her feckless husband, a college literature professor, is unfaithful and sleeping with one of his graduate students, and she retaliates with her own brief affair with a timid Iowa bank officer Sam Burns (John Lithgow).
Meanwhile, middle-aged Aurora dodges the womanizing flirtations of her next-door neighbor, a boozy, beer-bellied, over-the-hill, former astronaut Garrett Breedlove (Jack Nicholson), even though she has turned 50 and is now free to date. They have a nervous December-December love affair — on their first, much-delayed luncheon date, he boldly tells the proper, well-mannered and stiff Bostonian woman wearing a frilly pink dress:
Breedlove: "You're just going to have to trust me about this, this one thing. You need a lot of drinks."
Aurora: "To break the ice?"
Breedlove: "To kill the bug that you have up your ass."
In an unforgettable scene after lunch, Aurora and Breedlove ride in his silver Corvette as he drunkenly steers with his feet, sitting on the open roof and yelling: "Breedlove at the helm! Just keep pumping that throttle!" Soon after he cries: "Fly me to the moon," he is projected from the car into the water of the Gulf of Mexico. She splashes out in the knee-deep water to apologize and ask "How are you?" Characteristically, he jokes:
“ If you wanted to get me on my back, you just had to ask me. ”
Although they kiss, she fights back when his hand reaches for her breast inside her blouse, and accuses him of ruining their time together by getting drunk. When they arrive back home and she invites him in, he replies: "I'd rather stick needles in my eyes." Their barbed conversation continues:
“ Breedlove: I'll tell ya, Auror-eye, I don't know what it is about you, but you do bring out the devil in me. ”
Although she considers Breedlove "arrogant, self-centered, and yes, a somewhat entertaining man," she phones him up and invites him to her bedroom one evening soon after to look at a Renoir painting as a pretext for sex (after fifteen years of celibacy): "I'm inviting you to come over and look at my Renoir." He quickly interprets her meaning: "You're inviting me to bed." And she responds: "Yes, it happens to be in my bedroom." Again, he cajoles and cackles: "Is the Renoir under the covers?" The self-indulgent, horny playboy deliberately stalls and carries on a double-entendre conversation:
Even though she calls herself a "grandmother," they clench and kiss voraciously. They stand on opposite sides of her bed for a final confrontation — and the strong-willed Aurora wins.
The lights go off.
In the heartbreaking, unexpected, tragic, cathartic and touching finale, Emma is hospitalized and dying of cancer. She is slowly reconciled with her mother during her terminal illness. In a stunning hospital scene, Aurora runs completely around the hospital desk while yelling at two hospital nurses to give her ailing daughter a pain-killing shot.
Emma says a final goodbye to her two young sons Teddy and bratty Tommy (Troy Bishop) in her Lincoln General Hospital room just before her death. After she has makeup applied to her face to cover her pale pallor, she speaks to them, but is unable to break through to her distant, over-critical oldest son Tommy.
After a hug from Teddy and a reluctant kiss from Tommy, she asks Teddy as he leaves the room: "I was so scared. And I think it went pretty well, don't you?"
Soon after, she expires with one final glance at Aurora as Flap sleeps unawares. Aurora blames herself: "I'm so stupid, so stupid. Somehow, I thought, somehow I thought when she finally went that — that it would be a relief. Oh, my sweet little darling. Oh dear, there's nothing harder."
After the funeral, Garrett supportively pays special attention to Emma's long-neglected son.
”
“This is one of those rare books where the movie is better than the book. The book isn't bad, but the movie is definitely better.”
Mindy H wrote this review Saturday, March 8 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“I finished this book just for the sake of finishing it. Because I have seen the movie and love it, the book was a downer. It dwelled way too much on Aurora's self-centered life and not near enough on the relationship of Aurora (mother) and Emma (daughter) like I hoped it would. ”
Lindsey C wrote this review Monday, February 4 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“This was my first McMurtry book and while parts of it were good, it was not quite what I had built up in my mind. I have a feeling there is a much better McMurtry book out there, say, Lonesome Dove. Aurora Greenway was a funny, eccentric character, but I really wanted to know Emma better, especially since in the preface McMurtry described her as "what women are at their best." It probably didn't help that I knew Emma would die since my Mom liked the movie. I kept bracing myself for depression, but a very short part of the book was devoted to her illness and ended rather anti-climatically. However, I think some of the best writing was about Emma. As a Houstonian I did enjoy all of the Houston references - The Last Concert Cafe, for one, and "the softness and sogginess of Houston." The book was ok, but I will continue to find a better McMurtry.”
JenniSimmons wrote this review Wednesday, February 28 2007. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
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