Review of Mommie Dearest (1981) by Harry W — 18 Nov 2014

Receiving consistently polarizing reviews, I had to see Mommie Dearest to decipher where the line stood for me.

Mommie Dearest is a film commonly criticized for being too campy, and it took me a while for me to understand why. Once Mommie Dearest reaches its most heavily dramatic scnees, it is easy to see why. The acting in these scenes and general mood feel like a scene from Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. As weird as it is to compare these two films, the mix between silly camp and intensely serious mood that made Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory the film that it was is somewhat present in Mommie Dearest for some strange reason. The entire film ends up being like a soap opera telemovie with decent production values but a lack of sophisticated direction, and so Frank Perry directs Mommie Dearest to being a dull and tedious melodrama.

The pacing of Mommie Dearest is poor. It is such an obviously artificial film because it begins with Joan Crawford's daily routine, and by 13 minutes in she has decided on wanting a baby and already somehow received it despite being rejected from several adoption agencies, and then in the blink of an eye it is years later at her birthday pary where she has another adopted child. The screenplay is bad in this retrospect because it turns Joan Crawford's life into a series of vignettes with no consistency to them as well as skimming over a lot of key material. Mommie Dearest can never decide whether it wants to focus on Joan Crawford or Christina Crawford and therefore ends up cuttinng back and fourth between focusing on the lives of each of them without ever resting on it. The story isn't exactly about Joan Crawford or about the relationship between the two of them, it is never fully sure what it wants to be about. That is one of the many reasons that it barely feels like a true story. I believe that Joan Crawford was a maniac and that her relationship with Christina was of an abusive nature, but I believe there is a lot to the story that is left out. I'm not sure if this is due to the one-sided nature of the source material or because of the screenplay that it took four people to create, but either way things just fail to pull themselves together. The dialogue in the film is ok but it is vastly repetitive, and it ensures that the scenes in the film unfold in the same basic manner with a flat tone all the way throughout. While the rising tension in the atmosphere can be effective the first time, the fact that the film resumes the basic path going up and down in a bipolar manner without any true emotion in the film renders it very campy and a shallow piece.

The fact that the film cuts through so much at a rushed pace also causes it to skim over a lot of the real story. The story makes no mention to the fact that Joan Crawford would later adopt twins who she loved enough to leave in her will while disowning her elder two children, and the nature of her relationship with her son Christopher is not explained either, so why he was left out of the will is puzzling to me. Problem is that the story itself was not compelling enough for me to care about looking into it. Mommie Dearest is largely a boring and repetitive story which may work better as the tell-all book than as a campy recreation of the events.

The fact is that Mommie Dearest is simply a misguided film. It could have told a tale about a Hollywood legend and the troubling relationship she shared with her daughter, but it jumped back and fourth between that and the tale of her daughter. The problem is that Joan Crawford is the one who lived an interesting life, not Christina. Her version of the story is repetitive and is told in a melodramatic and campy fashion without much in the way of character depth, and there is really little entertainment value in the feature as a whole. The visual style of the film is decent with the scenery and production design all looking good enough to maintain the feel of a classical movie, but it is far from anything that can compensate for the story. The dramatization of a lot of story elements in Mommie Dearest is rather pathetic. Some of the more intense moments are decent, but a lot of the scenes which are just intended to be minor elements that contribute towards building characters prove to be just senseless. Mommie Dearest is always off with the atmosphere, so the direction and the script are both lacking. And thanks to this, the cast in the film have nowhere to go.

Faye Dunaway's performance is rather poor form. Many people criticise her for going over the top, I find that the fault is more in the scenes where she doesn't become aggressive instead. Her performance is devoid of any life when she can't get angry which shows that she fails to capture the sophisticated edge of Joan Crawford's public image. Joan Crawford was said to be a woman with the facade of perfection, but Faye Dunaway can not even fake that in the role. Her performance is nothing but cheap during the film. She has some sparks during the more unhinged scenes of the film, but even then there is a distinctive feeling of artificiality to her which makes all the efforts obselete. It is a rather degrading performance to watch because it is always either over the top or beneath the miminal requirements, never finding a way to meet in the middle. Even when Joan Crawford is dead you can clearly see Fay Dunaway breathing, and if an actor cannot lie still then that is just a sign of serious limitation in them, so it is easy to believe Fay Dunaway when she says the the downturn in her performance was anchored by Mommy Dearest. It is hard to believe that Fay Dunaway thinks she is playing Joan Crawford because you'd think she gave this effort for a 1980's horror B-movie instead. It is more up to the calibre of that than one of a serious biopic, so she contributes to ensuring that Mommie Dearest cannot be taken seriously.

And yet, even with the lacklustre effort of Faye Dunaway, Diana Scarwid still manages to do worse. Diana Scarwid has a constipated look on her face for most of the film which suggests that she really is inexperienced. Of the three women nominated for the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Supporting Actress in Mommie Dearest, she is clearly the most deserving of the award because she is in really poor form. Despite being an Academy Award nominated actress, Diana Scarwid really comes up the shortest in Mommie Dearest because her performance is exceedingly subtle and ends up little more than a pail imitation of soap opera acting. Diana Scarwid is in seriously poor form in Mommie Dearest, and considering the fact that the latter half of the film focuses more on her performance than on Faye Dunaway's she ends up bringing the entire story down further than it already was.

It is hard to expect much from an actress as young and inexperienced as Mara Hobel, especially when she is burdened by the weak direction and poor screenplay. Still, she delivers a generic child performance which is the fault of many people with her being one of them. She looks thoroughly confused throughout the entire production, and for a film where her role is the victimised adopted child of Joan Crawford, it is truly a shame that nobody came up with a better cast member for the film.

Steve Forrest also delivers a poor effort.

So Mommie Dearest is a poorly focused and misguided film with a rushed pace and a terrible cast. It has some tense moments, but they are shrouded in poor storytelling.