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| Kate Winslet sets her jaw for Mildred Pierce. |
Sometimes a friend you trust about such matters is so enthusiastic about a painter, a restaurant, a writer or a movie that you allow yourself to get swept up in the vortex, even though you may have some doubts about how tasty that food/painting/novel/film will be.
That's a little like where I was with Todd Haynes and his HBO adaptation of Mildred Pierce, not that Haynes and I are friends or anything. I'd recently watched the Michael Curtiz film version, with Joan Crawford in the starring role (for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1946), and I wasn't sure how Haynes could make that relatively stiff film noir into something with the depth of a good Masterpiece Theater. Not that I hated the movie -- it had its delights, Eve Arden as Mildred's wise-cracking sidekick, for example, Ann Blythe as the wicked Veda and Jack Carson as Wally, the conniving lawyer and sexual predator.
But after watching Haynes five-part series, I have to admit that he was onto something -- as our enthusiastic friends often are -- and the material, especially James M. Cain's original novel brought to life by Haynes and Jon Raymond's script, had resources I didn't imagine it had. And Haynes's visual style utterly upends Curtiz's dark, stark version. Given room to breathe, the story fills with music, sumptuous designs and costumes and gorgeous settings, and the LA of the '30s starts to speak to us.
