DVD OF THE WEEK: Mildred Pierce

In outline, Todd Haynes' five-part miniseries Mildred Pierce is nearly a gender-substitute copy of There Will Be Blood: a determined capitalist starts with nothing and rises to self-made success, but is fundamentally undone along the way by a tortured relationship with her child, climaxing with a Grand Guignol confrontation in a suffocatingly underpopulated mansion. Class status is an issue in both, but where P.T. Anderson went for big gestures and opaque characterizations, forcing viewers to interpret what makes the enigmatically misanthropic Daniel Plainview tick, the five-and-a-half hours of Pierce serve as a plausible, patiently portrait of how class envy and distinction—often unspoken and therefore particularly virulent feelings in American life—can literally drive someone insane over years of difficult social climbing.

Mildred (Kate Winslet) has a daughter, Veda (Evan Rachel Wood), and three men in her life: husband Bert (Brían F. O'Byrne), his corpulent friend Wally (James LeGros) and elegant waster Monty (Guy Pearce). For five-and-a-half-hours, Mildred largely keeps her business head while making poor judgment calls with all three of the equally worthless/worthwhile men. She saves her worst decisions for Veda, smothering her as a young girl and succumbing to her every whim: that her daughter grows up to be (effectively) an evil whore is at least partially Mildred's fault, with her own pathological insecurities taken to their logical conclusion by her ungrateful spawn.

Haynes' most overly idiosyncratic movies are polyphonic narratives, such as Poison (three interwoven short films), Velvet Goldmine (dual storylines set in separate decades, explicitly modeled on Citizen Kane), or the six fractals of Bob Dylan in I'm Not There. In these movies (along with the ‘50s-colored faux-Douglas Sirk of Far From Heaven), Haynes is explicit about his visual reference points, flawlessly approximating out-of-date film stocks and lighting with scary plausibility. The Fassbinder-like stylings of Pierce invoke the acerbic German melodramatist (and fellow Sirkian) with many borrowed framings of characters through glass panes and windows. Also cited are ‪New Hollywood's early-'70s takes on the past (Chinatown, The Godfather), films which brought color to an era largely captured in black-and-white in its own time: Mildred Pierce discreetly revels in natural light.‬

Haynes chose the path of extreme fidelity in adapting James M. Cain's novel; ‪the sudden final-hour leap into quasi-incestuous terrain feels both unpleasant and unnecessary, or at least at odds with the mundane-detail-oriented narrative focus of its most compelling sections.‬ Films over three hours generally make overt concessions towards the epic, either through grand scenes with milling extras teeming over spectacular landscapes or other assertions of grandeur (e.g., opening the seven-and-a-half hours of Satantango with a ten-minute tracking shot of cows). Haynes does neither: Mildred Pierce is, at its best, insistently quotidian. This is a film: producer Christine Vachon's vehemently insisted that this is a mini-series, not a movie, but nonetheless there have been marathon theatrical screenings. If you have the patience and time, watching the whole film in one day is recommended.

For all the sudden left-turns stretching plausibility in the narration and characterization, Mildred Pierce hangs together thanks first of all to Winslet, who deserves all kinds of superlatives as the lead in every scene, plausibly uniting all of the disparate impulses imposed on her by the sometimes implausible narrative. Her performance is the primary triumph in a project that doesn't overplay the parallels between its depiction of the Great Depression and the present-day recession. Economic insecurity as a fundamentally American trait is merely put into sharper relief by surrounding poverty, not created by it: the most absorbing parts depict Mildred's capitalist rise, from entry-level waitressing to the finer points of running a restaurant franchise, a meticulous record of survival under difficult circumstances. Men come and go; business dominates.

Posted by ahillis at January 3, 2012 1:01 PM