Mommie Dearest (1981)

Fresh and Exciting

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

I was abused at age 14 so I understand what Christina goes through. She gets hit with a wire hanger, spanked, choked, fed uncovered food, etc. Some hated this movie for a unknown to be true account of Joan Crawford, but I still think it's a great movie. It's a hard movie to watch but it should be seen. Retro Plex plays it occasionally. I think it's worth seeing.

Maybe because it wasn't about real life despised icons like Richard Nixon, or Senator Joe McCarthy, that a bio got trashed by critics before audiences turned MOMMIE DEAREST into a quotable punchline of bizarre biopic cinema. And yet, anyone who grew up watching this addictive, child-beating, temperamental show biz nightmare really did enjoy the damn thing...Dare it be said and agreeing with indie director John Waters on the DVD commentary: This maligned motion picture is solid entertainment as Director Frank Norris takes us back to the 1930's up into the 1970's with a colorful yet grainy, lived-in aesthetic as if we're there to suffer along with an incredibly talented child starlet, Mara Hobel as Young Christina Crawford who, grown up, wrote the bestselling tell-all novel that not only became a famous (if infamous) movie, but was her own final word to a rich mother who left her completely out of the will... Ouch!At one point, Hobel literally stands (stomps) her ground against Faye Dunaway, in a performance where the subtle stuff works better than unintentionally hilarious scenes like "No More Wire Hangers" and especially, "Christina, bring me the axe!"Which is right out of her William Castle drive-in exploitation STRAIT-JACKET as opposed to mentioning it as one of many films in her decade-spanning resume. Other than icing her face while leafing through the script for, ironically, ICE FOLLIES OF 1939, and rehearsing with long suffering maid Rutanya Alda for Joan's Oscar winning performance in MILDRED PIERCE, the timeline covered is completely off-screen, mostly taking place in her well-kept, anally dust-free mansion and, as her daughter ages into method actress Diana Scarwid, the intensity narrows into moments that really goads the viewer into loving-to-hate this woman who's blamed for both physical and mental abuse. When Scarwid's Christina smiles sweetly while ordering to a classy restaurant's gentleman waiter, Dunaway's snide, penetrating remark (pp),"It's not good to flirt, Christina," is far more effective than the noisy stuff...Scarwid... critic proof compared to Dunaway, who probably felt her career was stunted ala Tony Perkins in PSYCHO... injects eye-dagger expressions progressed from her younger self. After Christina is thrown out of a fancy private school, MOMMIE asks where she can fill up her flask and, after daughter answers too quickly, Dunaway provides her best line: "You know where to find the boys AND the booze!"Basically it's all a pulpy soap, including a third act marriage to the very sweet man who humbly ran Pepsi Cola, a nice change from mellow yet miffed, square-jawed, ascot-donning Steve Forrest, whose big brother, Dana Andrews, played opposite Joan in Otto Preminger's DAISY KENYON...What Joan does to "help" her daughter, after having finally gotten a role on a soap, is almost worse than the axe, the hanger, and a climactic, unbelievable beating and strangulation as Christina's legs are flipping and flopping on the expensive carpet while a reporter (Jocelyn Brando) is in the next room... Imagine getting away with that nowadays!According to John Waters, the studio had "plants" disperse hangers for the audience in order to chalk the entire venture as an "intentional comedy all along"...What's left out of the film's legacy is an immense fan-base that caught all the television and cable outlet screenings - even before the video boom of the mid 1980's in which, at that point, the cult status was already established: a sort of cult within a cult: Perhaps a combination of those who consider DEAREST a howler to others - the silent majority - who are mesmerized by Faye Dunaway's twisted yet natural, eerily and menacing performance as a psychopathic Hollywood A-list Oscar winner turned B-movie has-been... Say what you (they) will, no one else could have carried what critics and Crawford fans think is "pure fiction," but they didn't live with Joan like the true MOMMIE fans live again and again with Dunaway - with each and every viewing!

I feel like this movie doesn't go into enough depth and focuses more on Joan's life than Christina's when it was based on a book by Christina and her own life with her adoptive mother. I'd also like to say that Joan really gets a bad rep for this side of her but she obviously had some very serious mental issues and whatnot and deserves a little slack; also I feel that it's very obvious that a large part of the story is missing that wouldn't paint Christina as such a helpless angel.I still enjoyed watching the film and will definitely watch it again, I did not care for the direction of the film (skipping around a lot- no natural transitions) but the costumes and sets were pleasing to the eye.

One tip-off to the badness of this picture is the eyebrows. They dominate every scene in which they appear. You can't take your eyes off them - they're frickin' weird, idiotic, laughable.The eyebrows provide insight into the thinking of the director and writers of this picture. They saw this project as an exercise in camp; they totally focus on Joan's off-the-charts weirdness. J.C. was obviously weird, but the creators could have made a much more interesting picture by offering a nuanced portrayal.For the record, Joan Crawford's eyebrows were not invariaby laughable and she was not always wacky. She was extraordinary. She was alive. She was more alive than 99 percent of the women of her generation. She was a handful, to use an outmoded phrase - much too interesting and vital for the hacks who wrote and directed this film.The creators could have paid more attention to Joan's courage in defying the pigs who ran Hollywood. These pigs tried to tell her what to do; she told them to go screw themselves. I'd say "Bravo!" to that but the word "bravo" apparently never occurred to Frank Perry, Frank Yablans, and their gang of idiots. The film's creators could have done interesting things with the failure of mainstream doctors to help Joan through hormonal craziness. (She had big-time hormones, no doubt about it; mainstream medicine in the 1940s and '50s had no clue how to deal with big-time female hormones; this fact remains mostly true to this day. Alternative medicine does a much better job; unfortunately for Joan, alternative medicine barely existed in her heyday.)The film's creators opted instead for wacky eyebrows and weirdness. They made a joke of Joan Crawford. The impulse to make a joke of things was common in Hollywood in the '70s and early '80s when this film was made. See, for instance, what happened to the James Bond franchise via the oh-so-funny Roger Moore and what Dino De Laurentiis did to King Kong. Some of this impulse can be tracked to the "Batman" revival circa 1966.All of that said, "Mommie Dearest" is fascinating if you're obsessed with show biz and can't get enough of the backstory, no matter how wackily it's presented. (I'm right there with ya.) I like the glimpses of 1930s Hollywood homes. I like many of the performances.Someone should write a decent book about how the entertainment business is portrayed in movies and on TV, examining this film, "Entourage," "Sunset Boulevard," "Tootsie," "Coal Miner's Daughter," "A Star Is Born," "Gods and Monsters," "In a Lonely Place," "Barton Fink," etc.