Reza, could you possibly re-format your posts of the reviews so they don't appear in these thin columns? It's rather disorienting to read.
Edited By flipp525 on 1301061296
Mildred Pierce : TV Review
LA Weekly
Todd Haynes' Mildred Pierce Review
By David Ehrenstein
published: March 24, 2011
It's not your mother's Mildred Pierce. Todd
Haynes' five-part HBO miniseries isn't a "remake"
of the Joan Crawford classic or a radical
reworking of its ideas, like the gay indie
auteur's Douglas Sirk's inspired Far From Heaven.
Rather, Haynes and co-scripter Jon Raymond have
fashioned a scrupulously faithful adaptation of James M. Cain's 1941 novel.
The contrast between Haynes' series and Michael
Curtiz's 1945 Oscar winner is embodied in the
disparity between Crawford's grand-scale star
performance as Mildred and Kate Winslet's subtle
and modest take on a woman who discovers that
motherhood and a career don't mix and that the
former can be far more destructive than the latter.
Cain made his reputation with his first two
novels, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and
Double Indemnity (1936), both crime thrillers
that became movie classics. Mildred was something
else; a Zola-like study of mid-20th-century
America, recounting one woman's efforts to
survive the Great Depression to make a life for
her ungrateful daughter, Veda, that was better than her own.
Cain has always been viewed as a hard-boiled
crime writer like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell
Hammett, but his real masters were socially
conscious novelists such as Sinclair Lewis and Upton Sinclair.
Neither dealt with female sexuality with Cain's
candor. And '40s-era Hollywood was opposed to
candor of any kind. What it wanted was character
and drama laid out in bold, plain strokes not
the subtlety and detail that were Cain's
specialty. So producer Jerry Wald cannily
converted Mildred into a noir that fit the
proscriptions of the Production Code. Curtiz's
film forces Mildred's second husband, upper-class
ne'er-do-well Monty Beragon, and her romantically
predatory daughter to "pay" for their sexual sins
but not before flaunting the spectacle of a
mother competing with her own daughter for her husband's attention.
This "moral" makeover also served to flatter
Crawford's image. While effortlessly sexy in her
youth (especially in the 1932 Grand Hotel), by
1945 she had become decidedly unerotic on-screen
(her ice-cold implacability would later be
parodied by Carol Burnett as "Mildred Fierce").
With Ann Blyth's Veda as the erotic center,
Crawford could be the sort of woman she wanted to
be on-screen ambitious, determined but demure.
Once a predatory husband-grabber herself in films
like The Women, the older Crawford now aimed to
be a glossy stand-in for middle-class women with
simpler, less sexually oriented goals.
By contrast, Kate Winslet's Mildred beds more
than one man, for business (as with James LeGros'
scheming Wally) and pleasure (with Guy Pearce's
peerless cad Monty). Cain's use of sex was simply
realistic to life, and Haynes and Winslet keyed
to modern viewers and with no moral police to
mind in the realm of pay TV follow his lead.
As for Veda, Haynes depicts her as the embodiment of carnal anarchy.
"She stepped in primly, sniffed contemptuously.
... Though she was only 11, she was something to
look at twice." That's how Cain describes her
and how Haynes directs the conspicuously talented
Morgan Turner to play her. Turner's Veda sneers
at Mildred's rise from waitress to
restaurant-chain owner and lusts for high society
as if it were her birthright. When Evan Rachel
Wood takes over as the adult Veda, the
mother-daughter conflict becomes far more severe
than Crawford's showdowns with Blyth.
Veda's viciousness gets its due, but her artistry
does, too. Like Cain's mother and fourth wife,
she becomes an opera singer an important aspect
of the novel that the 1945 version ignored and
Haynes makes a cinematic meal of. The featured
attraction at an L.A. Philharmonic concert, Veda
performs a series of classic arias with Mildred's
favorite song, "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows," as
an encore a tribute to Mother offered with sly
disdain. With gorgeous costumes and lavish sets,
this climactic scene is an anomaly in a
production, designed by Mark Friedberg and shot
by Ed Lachman, that's otherwise as strikingly
compact as Rainer Werner Fassbinder's TV miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz.
And, like Fassbinder, Haynes doesn't hesitate to
go where others would fear to tread.
"She was acting less like a mother than like a
lover who has unexpectedly discovered an act of
faithlessness, and avenged it," Cain writes of
Mildred's feelings for Veda. Haynes ups this ante
with a shot of Mildred giving Veda a decidedly
unmaternal kiss. Like everything else in the
series, including almost every bit of dialogue,
it's right there on the page of Cain's novel, but
seeing it on the screen is a very different matter.
Mildred Pierce isn't an avant-garde art film,
like Haynes' Poison, Safe or I'm Not There. It's
aimed directly at a mass audience that it never
talks down to. But it talks about sex, class and
mother love with a brutal honesty that makes it
the most deliciously subversive thing Todd Haynes has ever done.
MILDRED PIERCE | Directed by TODD HAYNES |
Written by HAYNES and JON RAYMOND | Debuts Sun., March 27, on HBO
Todd Haynes' Mildred Pierce Review
By David Ehrenstein
published: March 24, 2011
It's not your mother's Mildred Pierce. Todd
Haynes' five-part HBO miniseries isn't a "remake"
of the Joan Crawford classic or a radical
reworking of its ideas, like the gay indie
auteur's Douglas Sirk's inspired Far From Heaven.
Rather, Haynes and co-scripter Jon Raymond have
fashioned a scrupulously faithful adaptation of James M. Cain's 1941 novel.
The contrast between Haynes' series and Michael
Curtiz's 1945 Oscar winner is embodied in the
disparity between Crawford's grand-scale star
performance as Mildred and Kate Winslet's subtle
and modest take on a woman who discovers that
motherhood and a career don't mix and that the
former can be far more destructive than the latter.
Cain made his reputation with his first two
novels, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and
Double Indemnity (1936), both crime thrillers
that became movie classics. Mildred was something
else; a Zola-like study of mid-20th-century
America, recounting one woman's efforts to
survive the Great Depression to make a life for
her ungrateful daughter, Veda, that was better than her own.
Cain has always been viewed as a hard-boiled
crime writer like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell
Hammett, but his real masters were socially
conscious novelists such as Sinclair Lewis and Upton Sinclair.
Neither dealt with female sexuality with Cain's
candor. And '40s-era Hollywood was opposed to
candor of any kind. What it wanted was character
and drama laid out in bold, plain strokes not
the subtlety and detail that were Cain's
specialty. So producer Jerry Wald cannily
converted Mildred into a noir that fit the
proscriptions of the Production Code. Curtiz's
film forces Mildred's second husband, upper-class
ne'er-do-well Monty Beragon, and her romantically
predatory daughter to "pay" for their sexual sins
but not before flaunting the spectacle of a
mother competing with her own daughter for her husband's attention.
This "moral" makeover also served to flatter
Crawford's image. While effortlessly sexy in her
youth (especially in the 1932 Grand Hotel), by
1945 she had become decidedly unerotic on-screen
(her ice-cold implacability would later be
parodied by Carol Burnett as "Mildred Fierce").
With Ann Blyth's Veda as the erotic center,
Crawford could be the sort of woman she wanted to
be on-screen ambitious, determined but demure.
Once a predatory husband-grabber herself in films
like The Women, the older Crawford now aimed to
be a glossy stand-in for middle-class women with
simpler, less sexually oriented goals.
By contrast, Kate Winslet's Mildred beds more
than one man, for business (as with James LeGros'
scheming Wally) and pleasure (with Guy Pearce's
peerless cad Monty). Cain's use of sex was simply
realistic to life, and Haynes and Winslet keyed
to modern viewers and with no moral police to
mind in the realm of pay TV follow his lead.
As for Veda, Haynes depicts her as the embodiment of carnal anarchy.
"She stepped in primly, sniffed contemptuously.
... Though she was only 11, she was something to
look at twice." That's how Cain describes her
and how Haynes directs the conspicuously talented
Morgan Turner to play her. Turner's Veda sneers
at Mildred's rise from waitress to
restaurant-chain owner and lusts for high society
as if it were her birthright. When Evan Rachel
Wood takes over as the adult Veda, the
mother-daughter conflict becomes far more severe
than Crawford's showdowns with Blyth.
Veda's viciousness gets its due, but her artistry
does, too. Like Cain's mother and fourth wife,
she becomes an opera singer an important aspect
of the novel that the 1945 version ignored and
Haynes makes a cinematic meal of. The featured
attraction at an L.A. Philharmonic concert, Veda
performs a series of classic arias with Mildred's
favorite song, "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows," as
an encore a tribute to Mother offered with sly
disdain. With gorgeous costumes and lavish sets,
this climactic scene is an anomaly in a
production, designed by Mark Friedberg and shot
by Ed Lachman, that's otherwise as strikingly
compact as Rainer Werner Fassbinder's TV miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz.
And, like Fassbinder, Haynes doesn't hesitate to
go where others would fear to tread.
"She was acting less like a mother than like a
lover who has unexpectedly discovered an act of
faithlessness, and avenged it," Cain writes of
Mildred's feelings for Veda. Haynes ups this ante
with a shot of Mildred giving Veda a decidedly
unmaternal kiss. Like everything else in the
series, including almost every bit of dialogue,
it's right there on the page of Cain's novel, but
seeing it on the screen is a very different matter.
Mildred Pierce isn't an avant-garde art film,
like Haynes' Poison, Safe or I'm Not There. It's
aimed directly at a mass audience that it never
talks down to. But it talks about sex, class and
mother love with a brutal honesty that makes it
the most deliciously subversive thing Todd Haynes has ever done.
MILDRED PIERCE | Directed by TODD HAYNES |
Written by HAYNES and JON RAYMOND | Debuts Sun., March 27, on HBO
flipp525 wrote:I think I'll wait to see it myself before labeling it a disaster. What the hell is "Hd Reporter" anyway?
Pointing out the lack of psychological reasoning for Veda's behavior as a flaw of the film seems rather pointless to me. It's clear, almost from her first appearance on screen, that Veda is somewhat of a bad seed and will never be satisfied with what Mildred gives her. To me, it's a fault of a 2011 lens that some lazy reviewer is demanding an intense backstory/explanation for the way she is.
Exactly. The reason for Veda's behavior was never complicated to me. She was a spoiled brat who may have been sociopathic as well. Mildred herself was partly responsible for this. Because of all of the tragedies this family endured, Mildred tried to make it up to Veda. But, at the same time, Mildred had to spend a lot of time away from Veda. Mildred felt responsible for what Veda became, explaining Mildred's strange decision at the climax of the 1945 film. But Veda was also, like some people, just plain rotten.
I'm looking forward to this. Good cast, good director, good entertaining source novel (some of the best trash you will ever read).
Edited By kaytodd on 1301010311
The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving. It's faith in something and enthusiasm for something that makes a life worth living. Oliver Wendell Holmes
I think I'll wait to see it myself before labeling it a disaster. What the hell is "Hd Reporter" anyway?
Pointing out the lack of psychological reasoning for Veda's behavior as a flaw of the film seems rather pointless to me. It's clear, almost from her first appearance on screen, that Veda is somewhat of a bad seed and will never be satisfied with what Mildred gives her. To me, it's a fault of a 2011 lens that some lazy reviewer is demanding an intense backstory/explanation for the way she is.
Pointing out the lack of psychological reasoning for Veda's behavior as a flaw of the film seems rather pointless to me. It's clear, almost from her first appearance on screen, that Veda is somewhat of a bad seed and will never be satisfied with what Mildred gives her. To me, it's a fault of a 2011 lens that some lazy reviewer is demanding an intense backstory/explanation for the way she is.
"The mantle of spinsterhood was definitely in her shoulders. She was twenty five and looked it."
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
-Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
It appears that yet another classic should never have been remade !!
Hd Reporter
Mildred Pierce: TV Review
3:37 PM 3/20/2011 by Tim Goodman
Director
Todd Haynes
Cast
Kate Winslet, Morgan Turner, Evan Rachel Wood,
Brian O'Byrne, Guy Pearce, Melissa Leo, James
LeGros, Quinn McGolgan, Mare Winningham, Hope Davis
Director Todd Haynes' miniseries fails to develop
the central relationship between the title
character, played by Kate Winslet, and her vitriolic daughter.
Everything was aligned for HBO and director Todd
Haynes to make an enormous splash with the five
part miniseries Mildred Pierce. A lot of
potential viewers hadn't seen the 1945 film that
garnered Joan Crawford an Oscar for her role as
the title character. Neither has there been much
current scholarship on James M. Cain's 1941 novel.
Haynes (I'm Not There, Far From Heaven) had seen
some modern day parallels to the novel
(Depression-era, but Los Angeles-based and more
to do with class restructuring than Dust Bowl
poverty) in our most recent economic downturn and
was particularly intrigued by the hideously
contorted unrequited love between mother and daughter.
Haynes wanted to focus on how Mildred Pierce
suffered from cheating husbands, economic turmoil
and long odds of making it in the world as a
single mother with two kids, only to complete a
reversal of fortune that ultimately wasn't nearly
enough for her daughter, Veda, to appreciate.
(The film with Crawford focused on Mildred's
then-shocking relationships with men, living
outside conventional norms, a murder and her
inability to please the petulant Veda).
The superb Kate Winslet stars here as Mildred,
with Brian O'Byrne as her first husband, Bert,
who cheats on her and is, after it becomes too
much for Mildred, tossed out of their Glendale
home. Guy Pearce plays Monty, the rich slacker
cad who seduces Mildred and stokes her
independence. Melissa Leo is her neighbor and
confidante, Lucy. And James LeGros is her
business counsel (and sometime lover) Wally, who was also friends with Bert.
But the central concern in Haynes' version of
Mildred Pierce is Veda, played as an 11-year-old
by Morgan Turner and then as a 20-year-old by
Evan Rachel Wood. Indeed, it was Cain's focus as
well, with Veda meant to be spoiled and petulant
at first and then increasingly mean and evil
through the years. But there's an absolute
disconnect on how Veda turned out this way and,
more important, how Mildred would both tolerate and fuel her behavior.
The miniseries begins in 1931 and Bert's home
building empire is washed out from the
Depression. Veda is 11 and, as soon as we meet
her, unbelievably haughty, for no discernible
reason. Turner, the young actress, plays her like
she descended from a BBC series. Compared to
younger sister Ray (Quinn McColgan), Veda seems
like an evil alien dropped down to poison the
Pierce home. Even though they live in Glendale,
Veda who plays piano fancies herself among
the upper crust and Mildred mostly endures the acid-laced talk Veda gives her.
What's not understandable here is why. So, from
the moment that mother and daughter are on
screen, their relationship is oddly unbelievable.
There's just no connection to the behavior or the
acceptance of it. If Mildred desperately wants
Veda's approval, we don't necessarily get that
from Winslet, who tolerates most but not all of
young Veda's indifference and acting out (she's
not afraid to spank her, for example) with a look
that says perturbed, not overtly hurt by the
unrequited nature of their relationship.
This is a crucial fault, because it never leaves
the miniseries during its 7 hours and 15 minutes
spread over five chapters. We get glimpses of
Veda's bitterness. With her father out of the
house and shacked up with another woman, Mildred
' gasp' has to work. (In the final hour, Mildred
talks to Bert and says that before the Depression
they lived as well as anyone in the country, a
sentiment that might have been handy five or so
hours earlier.) The only job Mildred can get to
support Veda and Ray is a waitress job. It's an
idea that disturbs Mildred but, hey, the toll of
the Depression isn't over. Her kids need to eat.
She's a lousy waitress at the beginning, but she
has a side business making pies, something she's
done at home for a while. And that's the key
turnaround for Mildred. One of the best clues to
Mildred's feeling about her eldest daughter is
almost missed ' a barely whispered statement to
Veda at the end of part two that is at first too
subtle and then, upon deciphering it, not backed by much evidence.
What we witness through the hours (HBO will air
the first two chapters together on the 27th) is
an admirable tale of Mildred, working with
Wally's backing, opening her own restaurant,
succeeding in a man's world. Meanwhile, Veda
continues to be something of a child prodigy at
piano, and Mildred foots the bills.
There's a very slow pacing to Mildred Pierce but
not one that should come as a surprise to fans of
HBO, which lets its creative people tell full
stories. And yet, you begin to wonder when events
will accelerate or explanations will be given.
Neither occurs much in the two years encompassing
part three. But part four suddenly lurches
forward four years and circumstances have
improved greatly for Mildred. Here's where we're
introduced to Wood's version of Veda. She's less
overtly hostile toward her mother' until a
well-respected music teacher gives Veda the bad
news. She not the talented pianist everyone (especially Mildred) imagines.
While Veda spirals into bad behavior and some of
her monstrous tendencies reveal themselves to
Mildred, we still don't quite get enough
storytelling as to why Mildred should be the one
to blame. Nor is it clear, other than a mother's
love for her child, while Mildred seems so
resentful of being shut out of Veda's life. The
girls has been a royal pain in the ass for most
of her life. Let her fly free for a while.
It's worth noting that noir is missing here,
replaced by ever-increasing melodrama. From the
first to the last part of the miniseries, Haynes
has a fascination with shooting from behind and
through glass, but the stylistic tic doesn't
reverberate with much metaphor, if that's what was intended.
The last two parts of Mildred Pierce pick up the
pace exponentially, but there's a strange rush to
it all and an almost too-pat coming together of
lives and story. Leo's role is strong but not
flashy. (Mare Winningham gives a strong
performance in a smaller role. Hope Davis has a
cameo.) Pearce's upper-crust descent is an almost
happy-go-lucky spiral, which wonderfully conceals
his later actions. And O'Byrne's steadiness as
Bert makes him the most likeable character here.
But when all the storytelling is coming to a
climax, there's something missing ' the same
connection that was absent between Mildred and
Veda from the start. It could have been in the
adaptation ' a loss of Cain's hardened belief
that some people just ain't no good. It could be
that Winslet's choice to dial back the melodrama
in Mildred is what hurts the cause. She seems
more like a mother who can't figure out what she
did wrong, rather than one who believes her
daughter can do no wrong and thus obsequiously
kisses her feet. That essential connection '
super needy mother, withholding, vicious daughter ' isn't fully developed.
It could be that Haynes' vision of a sweeping
mother-daughter story wants for a complexity, a
vast emotional grandeur, that the writing doesn't
give us. Or it could be that Mildred Pierce plays
better as hardcore noir, where motivations begin
and end inside dark hearts ' no explanation necessary.
Hd Reporter
Mildred Pierce: TV Review
3:37 PM 3/20/2011 by Tim Goodman
Director
Todd Haynes
Cast
Kate Winslet, Morgan Turner, Evan Rachel Wood,
Brian O'Byrne, Guy Pearce, Melissa Leo, James
LeGros, Quinn McGolgan, Mare Winningham, Hope Davis
Director Todd Haynes' miniseries fails to develop
the central relationship between the title
character, played by Kate Winslet, and her vitriolic daughter.
Everything was aligned for HBO and director Todd
Haynes to make an enormous splash with the five
part miniseries Mildred Pierce. A lot of
potential viewers hadn't seen the 1945 film that
garnered Joan Crawford an Oscar for her role as
the title character. Neither has there been much
current scholarship on James M. Cain's 1941 novel.
Haynes (I'm Not There, Far From Heaven) had seen
some modern day parallels to the novel
(Depression-era, but Los Angeles-based and more
to do with class restructuring than Dust Bowl
poverty) in our most recent economic downturn and
was particularly intrigued by the hideously
contorted unrequited love between mother and daughter.
Haynes wanted to focus on how Mildred Pierce
suffered from cheating husbands, economic turmoil
and long odds of making it in the world as a
single mother with two kids, only to complete a
reversal of fortune that ultimately wasn't nearly
enough for her daughter, Veda, to appreciate.
(The film with Crawford focused on Mildred's
then-shocking relationships with men, living
outside conventional norms, a murder and her
inability to please the petulant Veda).
The superb Kate Winslet stars here as Mildred,
with Brian O'Byrne as her first husband, Bert,
who cheats on her and is, after it becomes too
much for Mildred, tossed out of their Glendale
home. Guy Pearce plays Monty, the rich slacker
cad who seduces Mildred and stokes her
independence. Melissa Leo is her neighbor and
confidante, Lucy. And James LeGros is her
business counsel (and sometime lover) Wally, who was also friends with Bert.
But the central concern in Haynes' version of
Mildred Pierce is Veda, played as an 11-year-old
by Morgan Turner and then as a 20-year-old by
Evan Rachel Wood. Indeed, it was Cain's focus as
well, with Veda meant to be spoiled and petulant
at first and then increasingly mean and evil
through the years. But there's an absolute
disconnect on how Veda turned out this way and,
more important, how Mildred would both tolerate and fuel her behavior.
The miniseries begins in 1931 and Bert's home
building empire is washed out from the
Depression. Veda is 11 and, as soon as we meet
her, unbelievably haughty, for no discernible
reason. Turner, the young actress, plays her like
she descended from a BBC series. Compared to
younger sister Ray (Quinn McColgan), Veda seems
like an evil alien dropped down to poison the
Pierce home. Even though they live in Glendale,
Veda who plays piano fancies herself among
the upper crust and Mildred mostly endures the acid-laced talk Veda gives her.
What's not understandable here is why. So, from
the moment that mother and daughter are on
screen, their relationship is oddly unbelievable.
There's just no connection to the behavior or the
acceptance of it. If Mildred desperately wants
Veda's approval, we don't necessarily get that
from Winslet, who tolerates most but not all of
young Veda's indifference and acting out (she's
not afraid to spank her, for example) with a look
that says perturbed, not overtly hurt by the
unrequited nature of their relationship.
This is a crucial fault, because it never leaves
the miniseries during its 7 hours and 15 minutes
spread over five chapters. We get glimpses of
Veda's bitterness. With her father out of the
house and shacked up with another woman, Mildred
' gasp' has to work. (In the final hour, Mildred
talks to Bert and says that before the Depression
they lived as well as anyone in the country, a
sentiment that might have been handy five or so
hours earlier.) The only job Mildred can get to
support Veda and Ray is a waitress job. It's an
idea that disturbs Mildred but, hey, the toll of
the Depression isn't over. Her kids need to eat.
She's a lousy waitress at the beginning, but she
has a side business making pies, something she's
done at home for a while. And that's the key
turnaround for Mildred. One of the best clues to
Mildred's feeling about her eldest daughter is
almost missed ' a barely whispered statement to
Veda at the end of part two that is at first too
subtle and then, upon deciphering it, not backed by much evidence.
What we witness through the hours (HBO will air
the first two chapters together on the 27th) is
an admirable tale of Mildred, working with
Wally's backing, opening her own restaurant,
succeeding in a man's world. Meanwhile, Veda
continues to be something of a child prodigy at
piano, and Mildred foots the bills.
There's a very slow pacing to Mildred Pierce but
not one that should come as a surprise to fans of
HBO, which lets its creative people tell full
stories. And yet, you begin to wonder when events
will accelerate or explanations will be given.
Neither occurs much in the two years encompassing
part three. But part four suddenly lurches
forward four years and circumstances have
improved greatly for Mildred. Here's where we're
introduced to Wood's version of Veda. She's less
overtly hostile toward her mother' until a
well-respected music teacher gives Veda the bad
news. She not the talented pianist everyone (especially Mildred) imagines.
While Veda spirals into bad behavior and some of
her monstrous tendencies reveal themselves to
Mildred, we still don't quite get enough
storytelling as to why Mildred should be the one
to blame. Nor is it clear, other than a mother's
love for her child, while Mildred seems so
resentful of being shut out of Veda's life. The
girls has been a royal pain in the ass for most
of her life. Let her fly free for a while.
It's worth noting that noir is missing here,
replaced by ever-increasing melodrama. From the
first to the last part of the miniseries, Haynes
has a fascination with shooting from behind and
through glass, but the stylistic tic doesn't
reverberate with much metaphor, if that's what was intended.
The last two parts of Mildred Pierce pick up the
pace exponentially, but there's a strange rush to
it all and an almost too-pat coming together of
lives and story. Leo's role is strong but not
flashy. (Mare Winningham gives a strong
performance in a smaller role. Hope Davis has a
cameo.) Pearce's upper-crust descent is an almost
happy-go-lucky spiral, which wonderfully conceals
his later actions. And O'Byrne's steadiness as
Bert makes him the most likeable character here.
But when all the storytelling is coming to a
climax, there's something missing ' the same
connection that was absent between Mildred and
Veda from the start. It could have been in the
adaptation ' a loss of Cain's hardened belief
that some people just ain't no good. It could be
that Winslet's choice to dial back the melodrama
in Mildred is what hurts the cause. She seems
more like a mother who can't figure out what she
did wrong, rather than one who believes her
daughter can do no wrong and thus obsequiously
kisses her feet. That essential connection '
super needy mother, withholding, vicious daughter ' isn't fully developed.
It could be that Haynes' vision of a sweeping
mother-daughter story wants for a complexity, a
vast emotional grandeur, that the writing doesn't
give us. Or it could be that Mildred Pierce plays
better as hardcore noir, where motivations begin
and end inside dark hearts ' no explanation necessary.