Dark Highways

I think we should talk about the difference between movie stars and everyone else in the world (including television stars, broadway stars and regular people.) 

Movie stars can make the whole thing work through sheer force of personality. Why? No one knows. 

Would Terms of Endearment work without Jack Nicholson playing a randy, arrogant, astronaut who seduces and then comes to love his high strung neighbor? Yes, of course it would. 

It’s based on a novel by one of Americas greatest writers, Larry McMurtry, and features an Oscar winning performance by Shirley MacLaine and should have won an Oscar performance from Debra Winger. 

Also, it’s Directed by James L. Brooks who brought us The Simpsons and produced a ton of fantastic features. Here he’s just getting started and is at the height of his powers. He’s also responsible for one of the great final Nicholson features As Good As It Gets. 

Back when I bought Simpsons season box sets you could listen to commentary tracks from the writers and directors. And, in multiple cases they would talk about how Brooks would look at a story, immediately identify a story problem and then make it better.

That show works (or did in its first 20 or so seasons) because of a lot of incredibly talented and funny people but Brooks was near the top. 

Before we get to Jack you must credit MacLaine and Winger who envelop the prickly, loving, enraging relationship between a mother and a daughter. 

Every part of their stories will make you laugh and then cry. And this movie is very much their stories, I don’t want you to mistake this for a Nicholson vehicle. He’s important but he’s not the movie. 

But he’s also a star and when he shows up, it’s all fireworks. 

He plays an aging astronaut who has spent his life chasing young women and continues to chase them well into his 50s. No, there is nothing new in the sun, not even the DiCaprio dating method. 

But he and his neighbor keep sort of orbiting each other. And then there is a disastrous date and isn’t it wonderful when two people who shouldn’t can’t help themselves. 

There were a host of actors in 1983 who could have made a line like this sizzle on the screen: 

“I’ll tell you, Aurora. I don’t know what it is about you, but you do bring out the devil in me.”

A host of actors, I say, would have made a meal out of that. But there is only only one Jack. 

This is a movie designed to make you cry. And cry I did. MacLaine earns that Oscar in a scene in the hospital when she’s at her wits end. 

I’ll tell you one other moment, that blew me up.

Towards the end, when their romance is supposed to be over MacLaine’s Aurora is at her lowest moment and then she looks up and there is Jack’s Garrett Breedlove. 

I actually heard myself say, “he showed up.” 

And then I cried again.