Mommie Dearest Is a Riveting Look at an Endlessly Fascinating Monster

It took real courage for Jessica Lange to tackle the role of Joan Crawford in Feud, the much buzzed-about FX sensation about Crawford’s rivalry with fellow diva Bette Davis (Susan Sarandon) and how it informed the making of their joint comeback vehicle Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

Few roles are as associated with a screen icon as Faye Dunaway is with the role of Crawford, who she unforgettably played in the 1981 melodrama Mommie Dearest. Then again, in 2009 Lange scored some of the best reviews of her auspicious career, as well as a whole drawer full of awards, most notably an Emmy for outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or Movie, for playing Edith Ewing Bouvier/"Big Edie" in the television movie adaptation of Grey Gardens. So Lange has a surprisingly stellar track record playing queer icons cultists are fiercely protective of.

Playing Joan Crawford in a zeitgeist-capturing season of Ryan Murphy’s Feud only did good things for Lange’s thriving, largely Ryan Murphy-powered career as a queen of gothic television. Along with a slew of nominations for the rest of the cast and crew, Feud scored Lange yet another Emmy nomination.

It would be an understatement to say that Dunaway’s performance in Mommie Dearest did not do positive things for the actress’ career. The only award Dunaway won for it was a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actress. Mommie Dearest cleaned up at the Golden Raspberries, which professes to ironically “reward” the worst films of the year but are actually more devoted to picking on the year’s biggest, easiest targets, whether they deserve it or not. Mommie Dearest was even named the worst film of the decade by the organization, which says less about the film’s quality than it does about its enduring notoriety.

Then again, the first year of its existence, the Golden Raspberries really stuck it to that hack Stanley Kubrick by nominating him as Worst Director for that noted stinker The Shining (which, regardless of your feelings about it is, is an unmistakably badly-directed motion picture) and Shelly Duvall for her instantly forgotten performance in that film for Worst Actress. So Mommie Dearest wasn’t the first, or the last time the Raspberries mistook gutsy, audacious and crazily committed pop art for vulgar garbage.

Mommie Dearest was, and remains, an awfully huge target for mockery as well as cult appreciation/adoration. The Academy Awards tend to reward the most acting as much as it does the best acting. In the case of Mommie Dearest, at least, that’s true of the Golden Raspberries as well.

Her painted eyebrows arched into a look of perpetual stern disapproval, her aggressively made-up face a warrior’s scowling mask, Dunaway does work of great quality in Mommie Dearest, creating a larger-than-life icon at once utterly monstrous and achingly human, but she does work of great quantity as well. As Crawford, Dunaway alternates between a seductive movie star coo and unhinged, rage-filled shouting (judging by the volume, the movie’s script must be full of exclamation points), between putting on a perfect MGM smile for the public and the ever-present cameras and revealing her true self behind closed doors in fits of rage and torrents of verbal, emotional and physical abuse to her adopted children Christina (who wrote the titular tell-all the film is based upon) and Christopher.

Frank Perry’s commercially successful but initially reviled 1981 biopic begins in 1939. Crawford is only in her mid-thirties but in the unforgiving world of old Hollywood, where youth and beauty are at a premium, she’s practically considered ancient. Everything she does is motivated, on some level, by a fear of professional obsolescence, including adopting first Christina and then Christopher after a series of miscarriages.

These adorable blonde moppets serve as invaluable props to enhance Crawford’s public image as a smiling, reassuringly maternal figure with a soft spot in her heart for orphans and Christmas. For Crawford, perception was everything, and the acting and melodrama did not end when she left the studio. For her, motherhood was a role (the proverbial role of a lifetime) she was intent on mastering but one for which she was hopelessly miscast.

Mommie Dearest similarly depicts Christina as equally miscast in the demanding role of the adoring, endlessly appreciative — but sincere! — orphan saved from poverty and anonymity by the kindness of a movie icon as big-hearted as she is glamorous, if only because Crawford was so relentlessly controlling that no child could possibly have lived up to her standards.

Perry’s film portrays Christina’s harrowing life with mommie dearest as an endless, unwanted competition with Joan setting the terms and keeping score in ways that would never allow her daughter even the tiniest moment of triumph.

Crawford admirably wanted Christina (played as a girl by Mara Hobel and an adult by Diana Scarwid) not to be a spoiled Hollywood brat but she ended up depriving her not just of potentially corrupting luxuries but also love, affection, compassion, patience and everything else a child needs to feel safe, loved and protected.

If Crawford is a monster, which she unmistakably is here, she is a monster created in no small part by the sexism of the age and of Hollywood. In Mommie Dearest, Crawford is both victim and victimizer. Crawford copes with the overwhelming feelings of powerlessness and vulnerability that come with being in an inhumanly cruel and competitive industry by angrily and violently asserting control in the realm where she wields the power and fury of an angry Old Testament God forever eager to punish humanity for transgressions real or imagined: her household, where she ruled as queen, tyrant, mommie dearest and head cleaner.

Crawford’s mansion in Mommie Dearest feels like a set, vast, spotless and as sad as it is impressive. It’s a showplace in the truest sense, a decadent dwelling designed to be photographed and admired and envied rather than lived in. Purposefully or otherwise, Mommie Dearest feels like one of Crawford’s films, a screamingly melodramatic “woman’s picture” about the travails of a ferociously driven and just plain ferocious working girl out to make it in a man’s world at all costs that morphs gradually and unmistakably into a delirious psychodrama that makes Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? look like a work of Bressonian restrain by comparison.

Mommie Dearest is acclaimed and notorious for eminently quotable, often angrily shouted dialogue and endlessly mocked set-pieces, most notably the scene where a drunken and deranged Crawford berates and physically beats Christina for using cheap wire hangers to hang up a three hundred dollar dress.

The “No more wire hangers ever!” scene occupies a hallowed place in the pantheon of camp for a very good reason; in it, Dunaway’s performance reaches a frenzied crescendo of unhinged aggression and rage so deliriously over-the-top, even by the movie’s exceedingly lenient standards, that it engenders a complicated combination of nervous, unintentional laughter, horror, morbid fascination and even empathy.

Crawford’s cruelty and abuse is born of untreated alcoholism and untreated, undiagnosed and obviously severe mental illness but also of having to struggle constantly, first as a child abandoned by her father and then in show business.

Mommie Dearest is, indeed, full of big, uncomfortable laughs but it would be a mistake to imagine that the film’s comedy is wholly, or even mostly, unintentional. A streak of pitch-black dark comedy courses through Mommie Dearest. It finds its purest expression in a too-strange-for-fiction scene late in the film where a past-her-prime Crawford replaces Christina in the soap opera The Secret Storm despite the character being twenty-eight years old and Crawford being deep into her sixties.

Lurching about the soap opera set in a daze, unable to remember her lines yet desperate to remain in the spotlight at any costs, Crawford emerges as a figure of ridicule but also pity. In Mommie Dearest, Crawford is an old school Hollywood terror on the level of Frankenstein’s Monster and Dracula. What ultimately makes Crawford such a compelling monster is not her monstrousness but her unexpected humanity, which spills out in strange and unexpected ways, moments when we can see the good buried behind all that narcissism, alcoholism and violent rages. We recoil in horror at Crawford but we also can’t help but feel for her and the almost inconceivable pain underneath all that anger.

In the four decades since its controversial and divisive release, Mommie Dearest has gone from camp classic to classic of the cinema of “So bad it’s good” to cult classic to just plain classic. If a great movie is one you can watch over and over again and pick up something new and resonant each time, then this definitely qualifies.

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