72/100

Mildred Pierce isn't a particularly long book—my Black Lizard reissue wraps up on page 307. Yet it takes Haynes well over five hours to do proper justice to it, which explains why most literary adaptations constitute tasteful garbage. (As I noted a couple of days ago, the Curtiz version succeeds by treating the text as vague inspiration rather than holy writ.) Certain aspects of this epic treatment admittedly appeal only to process nerds like myself, for whom the myriad details involved in starting a business are no less absorbing than the plot. But Mildred's arduous journey from waitress to entrepreneur, complete with "unnecessary" tangents (e.g. Hope Davis' first appearance), provides an emotional foundation that the streamlined '45 film sorely…

I have been rewatching Todd Haynes' five part mini-series over the last week, in preparation for the upcoming release of Carol. I think Mildred Pierce is an exquisite piece of work. Haynes is one of the great American filmmakers working today, and he has a couple of absolute masterpieces to his name, Far From Heaven and I'm Not There; but to this point (pre-Carol for me) Mildred Pierce is his finest achievement. It is an underplayed melodrama, the colours are minimised, with greens and pastels, but the 1930s aesthetic is used to its fullest effect. The mini-series is a great American statement, taking the great book by James M Cain and adapting and raising it. The five and half hours…

do you ever find it appalling that so many of us can only find connection through trauma? that we can only make friends, lovers, partners by sharing the pain in our pasts and in our presents and hoping that their sufferings can merge with ours in a way, that we can untie together against the cruelties of this universe and these scumbags on this planet who cause us to regress and deform ourselves and break down in a puddle of tears, sweat and blood. do you ever think about how hard it must be for people who don’t know how to connect except through pain, because pain is all they know? i talk to people and i don’t understand them…

Part of my 5 Directors x 5 Unseen Films (17) challenge.

This five-part HBO mini-series from director Todd Haynes is a remake of the 1945 Michael Curtiz film starring Joan Crawford in her Oscar-winning title role. Like the original, this production credits James M. Cain's novel as the source for the screenplay, but any similarities to the post-war movie version are almost coincidental. It's as if an entirely different story was being told.

For example, the 1945 film is set up as murder mystery. Pierce is in a police station being questioned about the shooting death of her second husband. Most of the story then unfolds as a flashback as she recounts her life story. I suspect that Haynes, having…

I'll be completely frank about my opinions here - This feels like a bunch of men trying to tell a story about and aimed at women. But some of the problems are that they don't seem to have either consulted any actual women and they told it from a mans perspective, purely using the male gaze. It comes off as mansplaining women's struggles at us. The sex scenes are particularly gross and completely told from the male perspective using the male gaze and nothing in them is remotely appealing, all they do is alert you to the fact that Guy Pierce's character is a repulsive sleaze-ball, if that overt nuance somehow had slipped by you and needed to be shoved…

I love Curtiz’s adaptation of James M. Cain’s MILDRED PIERCE — he certainly knew how to work the material to fit Joan Crawford — but it’s Todd Haynes’ (CAROL, FAR FROM HEAVEN) version that is truer to Cain’s novel. Yes, most of Cain’s works are lurid and pulpy crime tales, sensational enough to be banned, but MILDRED PIERCE is the exception. Cain paints a detailed portrait of a difficult mother with an even more difficult daughter, both of whom get wrapped up with a exploitative cad. It’s an epic character piece that deserves every minute of the approximately six hours that Haynes gives it.

Haynes enlists Kate Winslet who plays the role with a muted air — not quite the…