Mommie Dearest

In real life Joan Crawford’s eyebrows were unusually distinctive but in this grotesque biopic-cum-character assassination they assume a life of their own, growing now larger now smaller on Faye Dunaway’s broad forehead.

Based on a memoir of the same name by Crawford’s adopted daughter, Christina, Mommie Dearest depicts the 1940s star as a neurotic, a control freak and a very, very bad mother. How much of this is true to life no-one knows but director Frank Perry goes to town in a series of escalating episodes that are so extreme in making Crawford out to be a monster as to be worthy of a gimcrack B-grade.

Dunaway, whose own eyebrows are famous for not being there, never manages to look anything but herself under what looks to be offcuts from a werewolf costume, but she gives the role all her, uncharacteristically raging like a banshee and, almost literally, chewing the scenery. Her fit over the wire hangers in Christina's closet is a classic of screen histrionics.

Aside from the sheer excess of it all there is no reason most people will want to watch this lugubrious story of abuse and wretched self-deception. Both as a child and adult, Christina is a rather uninteresting creature and there are really no other characters in what is essentially a televisual production. The film never explore Crawford as a person as did say the magnificent Frances Farmer biopic, Frances but as a hatchet job this is everything that Crawford’s disaffected daughter could have hoped for.

 

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