If you've never seen this 1981 adaptation of Christina Crawford's hatchet job on her late adoptive mother, Hollywood legend Joan, chances are you've heard about Faye Dunaway's unhinged lead performance. And yes, Faye is every frightening thing you've heard about and more, from the crossed eyes to the screaming fits to the unconvincing drunken wobbling. But give "the dread Dunaway" (Jack Nicholson's affectionate term for her) some credit. She's playing Joan Crawford, a melodramatic actress and fiercely assertive personality. Beyond that, she's asked to play Joan Crawford as the violent, alcoholic monster that her vengeful daughter wants us to believe she was, which demands an extra layer of mania. And surely, the producers knew that Faye was never the subtlest actress -- she earned that Oscar for "Network" with a convincing portrayal of an obvious but charming sociopath. Finally, she's dealing with an atrocious script. Faye didn't write lines like "I can handle the socks!" and "Tina, bring me the ax!" or dream up the ludicrous wire hanger scene on her own. The movie makers lavished a multi-million dollar budget on sets, costumes, make-up, a two-bit script and a director (Frank Perry)who obviously didn't know how to rein in his stars' worst impulses. I'm not talking about Faye here, I mean Diana Scarwid, the expressionless stiff who portrayed Christina as an adult.
Maybe Perry can be forgiven for not throwing a net over Dunaway -- based on every report, the lady is a giant pain (Bette Davis, for one, hated Faye even more than she hated Joan, and that's saying a lot). But why on Earth did he fail so miserably to coax anything like a recognizable human emotion out of Scarwid? After an hour or so of watching Faye chop the hair off, beat and insult poor little Mara Hobel (few movies are simultaneously so ridiculous and so disturbing), Scarwid shows up as teenage Christina, dressed like the Statue of Liberty and reciting lines from Jean Anouihl's "Antigone" (cute, guys) and somehow manages to get less believable from that point onward. Maybe Scarwid & Perry decided that portraying Christina as a listless, mealy-mouthed little simp would invite audience sympathy. Actually, we wonder if Christina raided the medicine cabinet for the anti-psychotic meds that might have calmed her mother down. The explosive mother-daughter confrontation scene, late in the film after Joan pulls Christina out of boarding school for canoodling with an apparently near-sighted boy, should be climactic -- the victim is finally standing up for herself. Instead, we cheer Faye on for pushing Scarwid over that end table, since we might be tempted to do the same if we were trying to get a realistic reaction out of such a semi-animated mannequin. "Mommie Dearest" destroyed careers, and almost everyone deserved their fate.
Maybe Perry can be forgiven for not throwing a net over Dunaway -- based on every report, the lady is a giant pain (Bette Davis, for one, hated Faye even more than she hated Joan, and that's saying a lot). But why on Earth did he fail so miserably to coax anything like a recognizable human emotion out of Scarwid? After an hour or so of watching Faye chop the hair off, beat and insult poor little Mara Hobel (few movies are simultaneously so ridiculous and so disturbing), Scarwid shows up as teenage Christina, dressed like the Statue of Liberty and reciting lines from Jean Anouihl's "Antigone" (cute, guys) and somehow manages to get less believable from that point onward. Maybe Scarwid & Perry decided that portraying Christina as a listless, mealy-mouthed little simp would invite audience sympathy. Actually, we wonder if Christina raided the medicine cabinet for the anti-psychotic meds that might have calmed her mother down. The explosive mother-daughter confrontation scene, late in the film after Joan pulls Christina out of boarding school for canoodling with an apparently near-sighted boy, should be climactic -- the victim is finally standing up for herself. Instead, we cheer Faye on for pushing Scarwid over that end table, since we might be tempted to do the same if we were trying to get a realistic reaction out of such a semi-animated mannequin. "Mommie Dearest" destroyed careers, and almost everyone deserved their fate.