| Paramount Pictures | Release Date: September 25, 1981 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
5
Mixed:
6
Negative:
2
|
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Critic Reviews
Miss Dunaway gives the uncanny, meticulous Crawford imitation that is at the heart of Mommie Dearest. The movie itself has nothing like the brilliance of the impression, which is why it remains an impression and can't altogether rise to the level of a performance. But on its own terms Miss Dunaway's work here amounts to a small miracle, as one movie queen transforms herself passionately and wholeheartedly into another.
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The best that can be said about this jumbled scrapbook of Joan Crawford's life from her middle years to the end is that it doesn't seem to get in the way of its star, Faye Dunaway, who gives a startling, ferocious performance.
This is Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford and the results are, well, screen history. Dunaway does not chew scenery. Dunaway starts neatly at each corner of the set in every scene and swallows it whole, costars and all. Much has been written and said pro-and-con about Crawford since daughter Christina wrote the book on which this film is based. Whatever the truth, director Frank Perry’s portrait here is sorry indeed, 129 minutes with a very pathetic and unpleasant individual.
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How else than as camp can you take Faye Dunaway's waxwork Joan Crawford screeching for an axe, or throwing a scenery-chewing fit over her daughter's use of wire coathangers in the wardrobe? Perry doesn't help, with his credit sequence tease withholding our first glimpse of the stellar visage, and his determination to pose 'Joan' in geometrical symmetry with the lines of her spotless deco domestic mausoleum. Really no dafter, perhaps, than some of Joanie's own Warner Bros melodramas; the trouble is, it thinks it's Art.
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