And still more Jack Nicholson completism. He got Oscared for this alongside lead Shirley MacLaine. James L. Brooks also got one for direction and another for adapting Larry McMurtry's raw material and yet another for best picture. Debra Winger and John Lithgow got noms but not gongs. Apparently I saw it back in 2005.
Schematically this romcom is a bunch of life events hanging off the febrile mother-MacLaine/daughter-Winger relationship. Notionally-Texan Winger unadvisedly marries numpty English academic Jeff Daniels and embarks on a life of child rearing in nomadic penury, leaving her mother in the very amusing clutches of improbable astronaut-neighbour Nicholson in Houston. (We're told he has legions of lady admirers but the ones shown are sceptical; similarly we're shown that MacLaine has a Greek chorus of male admirers — including Danny DeVito — so obviously they were made for each other.) The sprawling, feminised Southern Gothic frame reminded me of August: Osage County and of course it's some sort of prototype for As Good as it Gets.
I enjoyed Nicholson's comedy here immensely; his pratfalls are funnier and more substantial than the dialogue/plot/characters/whatever serious point Brooks was trying to make. Early on he distractedly empties his garbage bin onto the ground and falls out of a car driven by ladies who had attended a speech he gave, and the puppy dog look he recovers with was worn out by Brad Pitt over the ensuing decades. "Wind in the hair, lead in the pencil!" — while cutting hoops with (age-appropriate) MacLaine on a beach. And so on. So things dragged for me in that final half-hour when he was mostly off-screen.
Roger Ebert: four stars. Janet Maslin.