James Brooks's first feature seems somewhat presumptuous, or maybe just overgeneralized, about the bond between a single mother and an only daughter (Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger, respectively), as though no special insight were called for. None is called for very often, in any event, since the movie chooses to concern itself not so much with the mother-daughter relationship as with the mother's relationships, on the one hand, and the daughter's relationships on the other. The generation gap, together with the geography gap, the society gap, the sexuality gap, and various other gaps, affords plenty of variety, at least, as we switch between two lives and two milieus over a period of more than a decade. And variety is enriched, in a sense, by a method of characterization that tends to festoon the people with eccentricities, quirks, quips, quotable quotes, unique styles of dress, and other attention-getters roughly equivalent to the novelty-store arrow through the head. This method, which belies honest observation and bespeaks a nervous need to fill a prescribed "entertainment' quota, is a reminder that Brooks's background is in TV sitcoms -- specifically as co-creator of the mixed-nuts ensembles of Taxi and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The visuals of the movie, in contrast to its verbals, are at a level rather below a good deal of TV. Never mind the imprecision as to matters of composition, period, locale: writer-director Brooks clearly inclines toward the left side of the hyphen. But the washed-out, talcum-powdered image suggests, apart from all that, that cinematographer Andrzej Bartkowiak, who photographed Prince of the City and The Verdict in near total darkness, has had trouble adjusting pupils or apertures to sunlight. With Jack Nicholson, John Lithgow, and Jeff Daniels. (1983) — Duncan Shepherd
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