Joan Watch: Mommie Dearest (1981)

Watched:  08/27/2022

Format:  Showtime trial on Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Frank Perry

I've been avoiding Mommie Dearest (1981) for some time.  But Steven and Lauren were going to see the movie, and I figured - hey, this is a reminder or a sign it's time to catch up.

It's crucial to remember, Mommie Dearest was not intended to be a high camp classic - this was someone's idea of a warts-and-all, scathing unmasking of Joan Crawford and her hideous relationship with her children that blew the doors off the movie-star image, which... if you know how Joan's post 1950's career and life went, is almost punching down.  Not to mention her life prior to Hollywood and stardom.  And even after.

Look, Joan was very dead by the time the movie arrived and was unable to rebut the portrayal of herself in the movie, which was based on a single source, that of an extremely bitter daughter who had been cut out of her mother's will.

As I've grown older, I have become aware that smaller incidents for adults play out as grand dramas for children (just as grand dramas in the actual adult world frequently pass by unnoticed by children and people on twitter).  I know we're supposed to believe anyone who comes forward with a story, and I do - insofar as I believe Joan Crawford and her adopted children had a terrible relationship.  

But according to Karina Longworth (my source of info) the movie was released, met with howls of laughter, immediately found a crowd turning it into a midnight movie and rebranded itself  as a comedy.  Just imagine - you spent 18 months making a movie you think will tell the world something about people, will make their hearts break, and instead people are dying with laughter.*  

It's impossible to imagine this movie without Faye Dunaway playing everything at an 11.  But it's also where you have to say  - look, this movie is not Joan Crawford.  This is a thing people made loosely based upon some version of reality, but everyone brought their own stuff to it.   This is just not how it was or what happened.  So you can have fun with the movie, but you also need to understand that it took thirty-odd years for the movie to become it's own classic for Crawford to re-emerge from the image this movie put over her.  To this day, if you mention Crawford in mixed company, someone will shriek "no wire hangers!", and everyone has a laugh.  Which is a wild and somewhat tragic legacy for the actual human who crawled out of the dirt and absolutely made herself by force of will (and some sportf@#$ing) into a Hollywood star.  And we should all keep in mind that it's entirely possible that the movie is largely a fabricated character assassination.

That said, when the child actor portraying Christina Crawford is sitting in the bathroom after being forced to clean in the wee hours and pondering the inescapable world of her howling monster of a mother and she just mutters "Jesus Christ" like an exhausted fifty year old...  man, I laughed my ass off.

I can't really say what, from Crawford's extensive career, Dunaway based her performance.  Maybe she spoke to people who knew Crawford.  Maybe she just imagined what it would be like living with a bi-polar monster.  Maybe it's 9-parts Dunaway, one-part Joan.  But the decision is wild and without nuance.  

The portrayal is not just Dunaway, though.  The script provides absolutely no context with which to understand Joan Crawford.  She is a person acting without motivation.  Her fame and position and history is assumed by the movie's makers with no care for the audience, but there's also no explanation of Christina, no words put into her mouth.  There's a startling lack of curiosity about who the woman who was Joan Crawford was and *why* she would torment her children.  What Dunaway does get down is the Crawford voice (until it's lifted into shrieks) and she's helped along by make-up and wardrobe, certainly.  

But for viewers of Crawford's actual movies - it's a bodysnatching doppleganger.  Sure, Crawford was acting in everything else where I've seen her, but even in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, she's at a fraction of the pitch Dunaway is at in every moment, even in quiet moments, she's a threat to everyone around her.  Maybe there's something here from the hagsploitation era I'm missing, but this Joan couldn't have been in Humoresque or The Women or Sudden Fear.  

Beside her, all of the other performances are just reaction shots, including the lifeless Christina.  We do not understand how Joan meets her last husband or what happened to him.  He just stands around looking afraid of her.  Same with housekeepers who we're told hung onto their jobs because domestic work was that hard to find?  

And, of course, Christina Crawford, played by several actors but landing on Diana Scarwid as she hits high school and beyond, is a series of iffy wigs and a rotation of blank or scowly expressions.  In no way do I blame Scarwid.  She looks like she's doing what she can, but it's acting against a horse that's just kicking the shit out of everything around her, so she kind of has to hold still.  Which kinda works.

Is the movie the scream it was in the 1980's and 1990's?  I mean... it's a weird watch.  I don't know how much I've bought Christina Crawford's story since actually doing a little reading, and from what I know about Joan - she probably wasn't set up to be a success as a mother.  So it's probably somewhere in the middle.  If we did watch it with today's eyes, we'd also say "this is a movie about a child being raised by a bi-polar manic narcissist" and not find it as hilarious that Joan's out tearing up her garden at night or refusing to attend the Oscars.  

But, yeah, in the history of biopics, this one looms larger now than the figure herself.  Or did.  I think the movie is finding it's proper place in telling Joan's story, which is a very large footnote of dubious plausibility.

*look, Jamie and I were at the second ever screening of Birdemic.  It's a fucked up thing when this happens.