The five-episode HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce is by all accounts a faithful, nearly word-for-word adaptation of the 1941 novel. Which puts it in a bit of an odd place. This isn't Mad Men, a modern look at the past with an air of "Don't we know better now." But this isn't gritty period realism either. James M. Cain was a hardboiled crime fiction writer, and his Mildred Pierce was basically pulp. Which is just to say that the characters don't act and talk like real people, they act and talk like movie stars acting like real people. Which lent itself perfectly to the 1945 film adaptation, with Joan Crawford as Mildred. So why remake it in 2011? Just to win Kate Winslet an Emmy?
Maybe the producers saw in depression-era Pierce a reflection of the middle-class struggles of our more recent global recession. But that is even more strange, since though living through an economic upheaval that made ours look like a hiccup, Mildred Pierce barely does any actual struggling. The only thing that really struggles is her pride, and all a working woman of today would have to say to her is, "Get over it."
Mildred Pierce is a homemaker, a recently-divorced California suburbanite with one pretentious daughter and one fey one. Even though things are constantly handed to her by men (frequently men she sleeps with), she has to get her hands dirty and find a job to support her own and her daughter's lifestyle. Eventually she finds work as a waitress. Of course, this isn't enough for her, and she makes plans for starting her own business and pulling herself and her daughters up by their own bootstraps to the dream of upper-middle-classdom. Along the way she falls for down-on-his-luck playboy Monty (Guy Pierce) and her oldest daughter grows up into a nightmare. Certain tragedies befall with barely a blink and others with twin waterfalls of tears.
Of course, Kate Winslet's portrayal is outstanding, if only to say that she seems to be in a different movie than everyone else. The other actors seem to have taken a page from the novel's pulpy roots and are channeling gold-era stars and starlets—Guy Pierce's Clark Gable mustache and mannerisms, Brian F. O'Byrne's Karl Malden-esque sad sack ex-husband, Evan Rachel Wood's bitchy daughter like a Rosalind Russel you want to smack. They awkwardly pause and over-enunciate through the stilted dialogue rife with 30s-isms. But Winslet insists on playing the part straight, like a modern woman tossed into the 30s. She wobbles and weeps while everyone around her struts and stammers. When she delivers the famous "Let's get stinko" line, it's hilariously inappropriate.
The problem is that Mildred Pierce, as written, is one in a long line of powerful, bitchy female heroines. From Scarlett O'Hara to Margo Channing to Miranda Priestly, they dazzle you with their poise and power while raising disapproving eyebrows. In the early 20th century it seems that's all a woman could be, either a helpless damsel/ingenue or a confident, sexually active middle aged woman who revels in disapproval (the "angel" and the "monster" of Gilbert and Guber). It was the sort of character that Joan Crawford could pull it off without batting a mascara'd eyelash.
But with Winslet, there just isn't that tension between admiration and disapproval. The first problem is that because it's 2011 there's little she does that we would disapprove of. When other characters lambast her for being sexually active or working "common" jobs or concerning herself with her own finances, Pierce is entirely the victim. When she gets weepy or angry it's always entirely someone else's fault, and that makes her less sympathetic and more plain ol' pathetic. She is too hoity-toity to be lower-class and too desperate to be an aristocratic.
Which isn't to say that her performance, on its own, isn't remarkable. Many things about the show are top-notch—the sets, even when passed through them for only one scene, are lush and detailed; the ambiance is slow and measured, the cinematography takes on a golden-age fuzziness, and the colors are cool and comfortable. The plot proceeds like a novel, without stretching for cliffhangers or dramatic moments like most miniseries.
So Mildred Pierce is definitely watchable (more watchable in the first few episodes than the last). But what is baffling is why someone would make, in 2011, a movie about what someone in 1941 thought someone in 1932 would talk and act like.
If this was intended to be a loving time-capsule of the 1930s, then Winslet's thoroughly modern Mildred feels ever so slightly out-of-place. But if it's intended to show how any (white, middle-class) woman suffers in any age, then why is she so unsympathetic? Or, if it's about the perils of bad parenting, then why is she so sympathetic? Crawford's Pierce was both a sympathetic as a woman and unsympathetic as a mother, so her movie, for all its flaws, at least made sense.
Winslet, however, doesn't want us to disapprove of her on any level. And so, robbed of that tension, the show falters.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
The four-disc Collector's Edition has two Blu-rays and two DVDs and a pile of special features (but less than you'd expect for a "collectors edition"). There are audio commentaries only on two out of the five episodes, but they basically cover the entire production. There are also short five-minute introductions to each of the episodes, with the director going over what he wanted to accomplish in terms of character and design. Also there's the half-hour making-of featurette that aired on HBO along with the show. Most interesting is how they managed to make today's New York look like the California of the 30s.
"Mildred Pierce" is on sale January 3, 2012 and is not rated. Drama, Television. Directed by Todd Haynes. Written by James M. Cain, Todd Haynes, John Raymond, Jonathan Raymond. Starring Brian F OByrne, Evan Rachel Wood, Guy Pearce, Kate Winslet, Melissa Leo.
