Perhaps it’s projection to say we see some her own actorly insecurities flashing through Crawford’s wild, widened eyes, but it feels like we do, especially knowing now how it marked a tipping point for Dunaway’s subsequent career: it’s the kind of big, bleeding, vulnerable diva-upon-diva turn that would likely have inspired drag acts for decades to come even if the film had been more straightforwardly well-received. She was 40 at that point, on the brink of the industry dip that hit Crawford’s career around the same dreaded age. It’s still a strange, jarring experience built around a staggering, one-of-a-kind performance: resisting the kind of hollow celebrity impersonation that wins easy Oscars, Dunaway instead appears to channel Crawford’s brittle stardom via her own. Sincerely conceived films on which camp status is bestowed often age better than those that mirthfully chase it from the off, and Mommie Dearest is looking, through all its layers of foundation and smeary red-meat lipstick, very good these days. This swerve was at once the salvation of the film and its ruin: it gained a loyal, affectionate fanbase in exchange for the possibility of ever being taken seriously again. In an unusually immediate example of queer audiences subverting the mainstream, the studio rejigged the film’s marketing campaign accordingly, branding it as a kind of comedy: “Meet the biggest MOTHER of them all!” screamed new posters, to the dismay of producer Frank Yablans. Weeks into its release, with the film’s once-lofty Oscar hopes in the gutter, Paramount clocked that the only audiences embracing the film were those keyed into its obvious camp value. His one-star pan damned the film for aiming “just to depress” its sustained portrait of child abuse left him “feeling creepy.”Įbert’s was only the most impassioned of many dismissive reviews, even as critics singled out Dunaway’s unhinged bravado for praise. Can I be alone in this discomfort? Or have audiences, over the years, collectively decided to override the film’s gaze, making a joke of these scenes so as to make them easier to endure? Roger Ebert, for one, was rattled. As a screen monster, she’s nothing if not genuine.Įach time I’ve seen Mommie Dearest, its most violent scenes startle me anew: I find the harsh physical vigour of Dunaway’s performance, combined with the piercing, uncontrolled-sounding pitch of young actor Mara Hobel’s screams, profoundly uncomfortable to watch, and hear. At no point is Dunaway’s gorgon-esque Crawford winking at the audience at she shrilly beats, chokes and hacks the hair off her daughter, and neither does the film separately smirk at her performance. Which is to say it plays on screen as excessive, as absurd, but not as a joke. The great achievement - and initial downfall - of Perry’s adaptation is that it takes Christina at her word, filming the abuse as written. Joan Crawford can’t have done that, can she? That would be absurd. In writing about years of alleged abuse at the hands of her movie-star mother, Christina Crawford described cruelty of such excess that sceptics accused her of exaggeration, or even fabrication. Mommie Dearest is, after all, one of the most despairing parent-child relationship stories ever filmed, adapted from a memoir that, however fiercely disputed by certain parties, was written in pain and rancour. Way back in 1981, this is the kind of reaction the film-makers were hoping for. I hadn’t laughed at it because I didn’t, for the most part, find it all that hilarious I was unmoved by my fellow viewers’ arch euphoria because I was, to my surprise, rather moved by the film itself. What was I missing?Ī few years later, I saw Mommie Dearest again, alone, on a fairly ropey DVD, and everything about the film – and my own response to it – clicked into place. And yet I didn’t find the surrounding film as riotously funny as everyone around me seemed to. Its most iconic, culturally entrenched moments delivered all the ramped-up kitsch that had been promised, plus an additional, frightening jolt of in-context shock that they never had as isolated clips. I felt I hadn’t watched Frank Perry’s film so much as I’d watched other people watching it, and while there was both pleasure and fascination in that spectatorship, the film felt a little lost in the mix. A generation of viewers had already rehabilitated Mommie Dearest from its initial critical infamy, and determined how it should thereon be enjoyed. I left the screening having had a good time, while also feeling slightly left out of the joke.
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