Todd Haynes opened his mini-series MILDRED PIERCE rather quietly Sunday night. For fans of the 1945 film noir version (and I certainly include myself in that club) that quietness might have come as something of a shock. Michael Curtiz opened his film with a murder, followed by a quick plunge into the mystery surrounding the killing. Haynes has kept his promise to hew closer to the book by James M. Cain. This ain't your mommie dearest's MILDRED PIERCE.
No, this is good old fashioned slow groove mini-series melodrama. The central conflict of the first two episodes isn't murder or mystery; it's a woman's attempts to find a job. If that seems like low-voltage stuff, it is.
But what makes it so interesting is that Haynes, like Cain before him, is taking the inherent class conflict seriously. If the Curtiz version of the story has a problem it's that Joan Crawford's Mildred is a long suffering saint. Her wicked daughter Veda is simply devil spawn, the most ungrateful child ever put on screen. Kate Winslet's Mildred, on the other hand, seems much more like Veda's mother. You can sorta see where Veda got her class snobbishness from. Like many parents, Mildred has passed on the worst of herself to her child and must watch in horror as it gradually becomes the child's defining characteristic. What Cain got at--and what, at least on the basis of the first two episodes, Haynes seems to be trying to get at--is the terrible way children can become ghoulish mirror images of their parents.
Veda scores a laugh in the first episode when she berates someone as being "distinctly middle class" but this contempt for the middle class makes sense in light of Mildred's reluctance to take a job to support her children. Crawford's Mildred hopped to work when the opportunity arose. There was no way that a Hollywood heroine was going to insult her audience by implying that manual labor was for an inferior breed of people. Winslet, on the other hand, ends up puking in a toilet at the thought of debasing herself. At the outset of the Depression, she's still clinging to a bourgeois image of herself. When she takes the job it's more an act of desperation--one which Veda cannot understand or forgive.
Part 3 debuts Sunday, April 3rd.
Check out the interview Christina Radish did with Kate Winslet and Tood Haynes about their new adaptation of MILDRED PIERCE. Good stuff.
Read here.
It's too early to say for sure, but the most exciting noir-related event of the year might well be the premiere of director Todd Haynes's HBO mini-series adaptation of James M. Cain's novel MILDRED PIERCE. It's a five part series, a strong indication that Haynes and his collaborators will be sticking closer to the novel than to Michael Curtiz's 1945 noir starring Joan Crawford. A look at the trailer for the film seems to bear this out. I for one am relieved by this. Curtiz's film is excellent, so there's no reason to remake a film that got pretty much everything right the first time. The book, however, is quite different from the '45 film, and Haynes clearly sees untapped possibilities in the original material. The mini-series format seems ideally suited for Cain's melodrama, and with a cast including Kate Winslet, Evan Rachel Wood, and Guy Pearce, this looks like it could be something special.
Look for it in March.
View the trailer here.
Hollywood has always been in the business of adaptation. From the beginning, it looted libraries and Broadway theaters looking for ideas, and it started making sequels and remaking hits as soon as it could. This is good to bear in mind if you started getting depressed about the lamentable state of American film at present. (How many comic book movies or adaptations of video games or 80s era cartoons can our culture want? How much candy can you eat before you vomit?) Hollywood seems to be getting better at making films that exist for no other reason than to act as the centerpiece of a marketing campaign.
But I digress. I can bitch about the steady disintegration of American culture all day long, but the good news is that some people--yes, even in Hollywood--have cultural memories that go back further than the Smurfs.
One of those people is the writer/director Todd Haynes. One of his best films was the Julianne Moore drama Far From Heaven, a film that consciously worked in the same vein as 1950s era Douglas Sirk melodramas like All That Heaven Allows. It's a terrific piece of work, and it bodes well for Haynes's upcoming adaption of James M. Cain's novel Mildred Pierce, which, of course, formed the basis of the Michael Curtiz classic of the same name starring Joan Crawford.
Some noir purists may be taken aback by the suggestion that anyone would remake one of Hollywood's great melodramas. If so, bear a few things in mind:
1. The original isn't perfect. Now, don't get me wrong, I love Curtiz's Mildred Pierce. It's a capital-G Great film, and it's as entertaining a slice of noir melodrama as you can find. It does, however, rather make Mildred something of a martyr, and this very flaw is the pivot on which an adaption might turn. It would be interesting to see the story with more of the hard edge Cain intended. Which brings me to my second point...
2. The original film is a loose adaption of the novel. Don Malcolm, writing a book-to- film comparison for the Noir City Sentinel, pointed out that Cain was terribly unhappy with what Warner Brothers did to his novel because he'd written Mildred Pierce as a break from his usual lust-and-greed potboilers like The Postman Always Rings Twice. Hollywood wasn't having it, though, and made the story into a murder mystery. I have no idea how faithful Haynes intends to be to either the book or the original movie, but there is plenty of room to explore here. The fact that Haynes is doing this as a mini-series for HBO bodes well.
3. Check this out: Kate Winslet as Mildred, Rachel Evan Wood as Veda, and Guy Pearce as Monty. That's a killer cast (and the supporting players include Melissa Leo and Mare Winningham). With Haynes at the controls, this holds a lot of promise.
Here's more on the project.
