Todd Haynes Flunks Melodrama
After decades spent in cinema’s art-house
desert, Ivy League favorite Todd Haynes makes his first foray into genre
filmmaking—that is, popular filmmaking—with the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce. It isn’t exactly a
crowd-pleasing woman’s picture like the now-mythic 1945 Joan Crawford Mildred Pierce, directed by the uncool
Michael Curtiz, but it’s a slight departure from Haynes’ usual academic movies,
the understandably unpopular Safe, Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven and I’m Not
There.
Here Haynes experiments with conventional
storytelling, using James M. Cain’s 1941 novel about a working-class American
woman (miscast Brit Kate Winslet as the banally named Mildred) who rises in
business, operating her own fried chicken and baked pies restaurant, and
endures personal crises of romantic frustration and disrespected motherhood.
For Haynes, this five-episode project equals the intellectual effort (and
running time) of three features, yet HBO forces him to finally address a real
viewing public, rather than a coterie—the first respectable risk of his career.
Mildred
Pierce ultimately flunks the test. It’s not a remake
of Curtiz—Haynes is too high-toned for that—nor another of his meta-cinema
pastiches as Far From Heaven
bowdlerized too-cool Douglas Sirk. Academics prefer to analyze the popular
Hollywood narratives that bewilder them and Haynes’ epic soap opera simply
isn’t vulgar—that is, populist—enough.
Hollywood melodrama is a peculiarly fascinating
genre highlighting the emotional values of female experience. Before it became
fodder (“text”) for gay and women’s studies, it epitomized the empathy of
sensitive artists—like Stahl, Goulding, Preminger, Borzage, Clarence Brown,
even Japan’s Kenzo Mizoguchi. In Mizoguchi’s The Life of Oharu (helpfully screening April 1 and 2 as part of
Film Forum’s “Five Japanese Divas” series), a woman’s constant suffering
recounts social history and illustrates a philosophical approach life. Kinuyo
Tanaka’s title performance as a woebegone courtesan increased one’s recognition
of usually derided emotion. Mizoguchi’s story visualized personal (national)
feeling, depicting the spiritual aspect of common experiences: love, longing,
perseverance. Oharu’s counterfeiter
episode adds painful political clarity that, more than raise the film above
melodrama, proves why melodrama—when emotionally precise and visually exact—can
be great.
For all Haynes’ New Queer Cinema audacity and
political skepticism, Mildred Pierce
lacks a carefully modulated—or empathetic—narrative rhythm. (Right now, Eric
Mendelsohn’s 3 Backyards and François
Ozon’s Potiche are far superior
melodramas.) Cinematographer Ed Lachman provides deluxe Chinatown lighting for the Depression-era Los Angeles setting, yet
the story feels uninterpreted. When Curtiz turned Mildred Pierce into a murder mystery, he caught the essence of
Cain’s hard-boiled storytelling; sharpening Mildred’s “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems”
practicality also distilled Cain’s insight into American social mobility and
hidden class inferiority.
Warner Bros. sincerely dedicated the film to
working women; Curtiz’s crime plot—if morally understood—fulfilled a working
woman’s grievance: her anger and her hurt, and it provided moral justice.
Highbrow Haynes takes no position on Mildred’s self-interest and industrious
pragmatism or on the “maid vs. mistress” sex/class cynicism of her upper-class
lover Monty (Guy Pearce in his best performance, yet imparting the fakery of L.A. Confidential). Add visually
unresonant filmmaking (something Haynes’ supporters don’t realize), and this
morally blank melodrama becomes a contradiction in terms—achieving neither
Mizoguchi’s nor Hollywood’s power.
Mildred
Pierce could have been Haynes’ The Godfather—a genre breakthrough that also addressed core social
concerns. Consider that Mildred’s loner attitude toward men makes her slightly
proto-feminist, as does her obsession with her eldest daughter Veda (played by
Evan Rachel Wood), who embodies her hopes and ambitions. This parent-child
relationship mirrors that of Don Vito and Michael Corleone, yet the
melodramatic turn (Veda’s backstabbing ingratitude) that galvanized the
Crawford film—and made it an archetypal women’s picture—reveals a unique aspect
of America’s class dilemma. Cain divined how progenitors’ sacrifice gets met by
thankless descendants. His spoiled brat invention—beautiful, demonic
Veda—anticipated the Baby Boomer Generation that would scoff at their parents’
travails and selfishly embarrass their devotion.
The daughter-to-mother slap that became part of
Crawford’s legacy (and no doubt won her the Oscar) gets diminished when Haynes
follows Cain’s novel to a fault. His botch of the mother-daughter dynamic
reveals zero cinematic feeling and is part of the current nihilist attitude
toward family (the academic bugaboo) that also disparaged Sofia Coppola’s
heedless scion Mary in The Godfather:
Part III. Veda, the projection of economic, romantic hopes, suggests a
female Michael Corleone. Yet Haynes doesn’t get to the spiritual heart of
family betrayal; he lapses into an ironic Fassbinder pantomime that also
misreads Fassbinder’s profound affinity for melodrama. Haynes drags through
Cain’s saga like an American indie equivalent to those BBC series based on
classic English literature; he treads water until Part 5, where he finally gets
down to business and imitates a Fassbinder movie replete with Lili Marleen
costumes and furs and hats.
Haynes runs smack into the popular reflex
legendarily associated with Mildred
Pierce. In other words, this is the first Haynes film actually about the
American experience and not some aesthetic or ideological exegesis. But he
can’t get away with the same art-school games played in his unbearable fake
biopic about Bob Dylan, I’m Not There.
His showing-off culminates in Cain’s conceit about Veda’s social and artistic
climb into a coloratura soprano. Classical Hollywood would have recognized this
turn as kitsch but Haynes plays kitsch straight—with Veda-like snobbery yet
without conviction. This exposes weakness in Cain’s full concept that Curtiz and
Warner Bros. had the sense to avoid. They understood Cain’s material (he’s best
known for authoring The Postman Always
Rings Twice and Double Indemnity)
less cynically than Haynes.
Of course, Mildred
Pierce comes down to Mildred. Haynes uses Winslet and Wood for 21st-century
candor as in their sexually frank nude scenes—stark, unromantic, Eric Fischl
transgressions. But Haynes doesn’t have the artist Fischl’s or even
Fassbinder’s political sense or the emotion, which powered their aesthetic
strategies. And he doesn’t have Crawford. As a film student, Haynes should
know—and respect—the star appeal that sustained Mildred Pierce for decades. With her Clarence Brown, Frank Borzage
working-girl background (described as “a thoroughbred” in Sadie McKee), Crawford was a star for a reason: She regally
represented the common folk. That’s why Hollywood matters; that’s its secret,
“magic” poetry. Crawford’s armored-in-fur hauteur was the mantel of hopes and
accomplishment that average, film-going women recognized, responded to and when
movies were indeed a purely popular art form, not a text.
Mildred
Pierce
Directed
by Todd Haynes
On
HBO, beginning March 27
The
Life of Oharu
Directed
by Kenzo Misoguchi
Part
of “5 Japanese Divas” series at Film Forum
Runtime:
148 min.