The Evening Star ** (1996, Shirley MacLaine, Bill Paxton, Juliette Lewis, Miranda Richardson, Marion Ross, Donald Moffat, Scott Wolf, Jack Nicholson, Ben Johnson) – Classic Movie Review 7508

The grand evening star is Shirley MacLaine, who at the age of 62 revisits her Best Actress Oscar-winning role as Aurora Greenway in the film version of Larry McMurtry’s sequel to Terms of Endearment (1983).

[Spoiler alert] Fans will remember that Aurora’s daughter died in the original, and we now see Aurora in her twilight years wrestling with the selfish grown-up grandchildren she has reared, battling with her difficult friends, especially her bitchy bosom buddy Patsy (Miranda Richardson) and bickering with her loyal employees Rosie and Hector (Marion Ross, Donald Moffat), while trying to come to terms with getting on – terms of endurement, as it were.

One of her grandsons is in prison, the other married to a boring wife, while her granddaughter (Juliette Lewis) is having an affair with a feckless drifter called Bruce (Scott Wolf). Most improbably, she has a fling with her hunky, young, mother-fixated analyst Jerry (Bill Paxton). As the evening stars cast a long shadow, her old astronaut buddy Garrett Breedlove (Jack Nicholson) pops in briefly to grin a lot and muse that if she is still looking for love she better hurry because there aren’t many shopping days left till Christmas.

The Evening Star is a terrible mess of a film, unwieldy, sprawling and episodic, and finally seemingly endless, as year follows year in the narrative. Novels work like this but films just don’t – and nobody seems to have told writer and debut director Robert Harling, the playwright of Steel Magnolias, whose inexperience is cruelly showing.

Some of the movie is so sentimental and unconvincing that you wonder why the rest of it can be so sharp and amusing. Nevertheless, there are lots of quality ingredients in an indigestible stew, among them MacLaine’s stalwart, irrepressible turn and the fine gallery of witty lines, spat out with relish by actors who do not always get good lines to speak.

It runs 129 minutes, but a good editing job, taking out around half an hour, including most of the last half hour, would help immeasurably. There is a good film trying to get out of here, when in this cut it is the cinema audience who is trying to get out of here.

The film is dedicated to the memory of great star character actor Ben Johnson, who, in his last film before his death on April 8 1996, has a brief but touching role as the neighbour Arthur Cotton, who weds Aurora’s housekeeper.

Also in the cast are George Newbern, Mackenzie Astin, Jennifer Grant, China Kantner, Shawn Taylor Thompson. Jake Langerud and Sharon Bunn.

The fans did not come. Terms of Endearment grossed $108,000,000 in the US back in 1983 but this one took only $12,767,000 in 1996.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7508

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