• Mommie Dearest

11/8/21 (Mon)

Frank Perry’s 1981 gothic portrait of the late Joan Crawford as the mother from hell is well deserving of its reputation as a camp classic. The construction is rather slapdash: characters come and go, such as random lovers and a son who drops out of the story along the way, and there’s not a lot of attempt to let story or characterization get in the way of a lurid detail. For instance, the infamous coat hanger scene gives no justification whatsoever of what might have prompted Joan to go from euphoria at having won an Oscar (for Mildred Pierce) to hysterically violent gargoyle just an hour later, nor is there any explanation of what she’s got against coat hangers in the first place (the real Joan was evidently triggered by memories of her mother slaving away in a laundry). We’re just supposed to accept this as given. She later drags her daughter out of the school she loved and enrolls her in a strict Catholic seminary, after which we see the girl graduating several years later with no clue of what she might have gone through in the interim. So what was the point? Beats me. And this pretty much characterizes the movie as a whole.

But all else pales before Faye Dunaway’s awesomely over-the-top performance as the aging star. The daughter had recalled (or created) the monster-to-end-all-monsters in her memoirs, and Dunaway proves more than equal to the task of bringing that to fearful life. The most impressive scene along with the coat hangers was her physical attack on her daughter, when she pushes her down, knocks over furniture, and rolls around on the floor with her daughter’s neck in her hands. This is a drag queen’s fantasy come true. I kept thinking of Gloria Swanson’s wild look at the end of Sunset Boulevard (Swanson was in fact considered for this role). We get that Joan treats her kids as props for her own image and is perhaps jealous of their fortunate circumstances compared to her poverty-stricken childhood, though nothing is clear in the director’s eagerness to get to the next set piece. It’s all obliterated anyway by the ferocity of Dunaway’s performance. She has her quiet moments but always seems wound up tightly, ready to lash out at any time. It’s an impressive showing. Whatever the truth or otherwise of the material – and that’s a matter of some controversy – Dunaway brings it into another dimension. She’s since dismissed her acting here as Kabuki-like, a wrong-headed understanding of that art form (even with her white-creamed face in the coat hanger scene); I think she means gothic.

Dunaway has said that the role damaged her career, and it’s certainly hurt Crawford’s image, turning her from Hollywood legend to Medea on speed – she’s probably better known these days for being a bad mother than a fine actress. That’s entirely unfair, of course, and the movie isn’t remotely believable as presented here. But who cares? We’re here for the fireworks, and it delivers, living up to its legend and then some.

It’s hard to know what to make of Perry given his failure to rein in the actress or give credible motivations to the characters (he was also one of the writers). In his The Swimmer, they had to hire another director to re-shoot certain scenes with new actors to make sense out of it. They might have done well to repeat that here. Diana Scarwid is underpowered as the grown-up Christina; a little more fire would have been welcome, though maybe the passiveness was part of the child abuse message. Others were fine to the extent we even notice them, especially Howard Da Silva as Louis B Mayer. Not a good movie or even a pleasant one with all the nastiness. But an experience to be sure.