Mildred Pierce

Mildred Pierce is a masterpiece.

HBO has done it again, investing in a project of substance and a lead actress who powers it home.

Haynes has created not only a rich and nuanced vehicle for his A-list cast--among them Kate Winslet, Evan Rachel Wood and Guy Pearce--he has given us a rare and valuable gift: an American melodrama about class.

If you buy the overwrought emotions so ornately expressed, you'll buy this TV movie's conviction. I was occasionally skeptical, but sold by the terrific performances.

Is Veda what happens when we shelter children from economic realities? Is she a bitch because her father left? Or simply a bad seed? That we never really find out didn't ruin Mildred Pierce for me. The story, after all, isn't called "Veda Pierce," and what remains is a surprising amount of fun, given that we're talking divorce, Depression and dysfunction.

In HBO's miniseries Mildred Pierce, beginning on 27 March, she embodies the sort of ambition and resilience that might seem ideal during a depression-or even a great recession. That is, she's a function of her time (the one first imagined for her by James M. Cain) as well as ours.

The new Mildred isn't perfect. Sometimes it has too much time on its hands, holding scenes just because it can. But watching it is time well-spent, because it reminds us that not everyone gets over the rainbow to the place where the dreams you dare to dream really do come true.

After a plodding start, Mildred becomes increasingly absorbing.

Film buffs will have a field day analyzing the themes: social climbing, postwar materialism, feminism, lousy parenting, etc. But this is not event TV like "Boardwalk Empire."

If you're a purist James M. Cain fan, this is the miniseries for you. The intricacies of the story are laid out like a delicious Mildred chicken buffet. But, if you adore the original zippy, wise-cracking crime story with ankle-straps, order up Netflix instead.

For the most part, [Haynes] succeeds because he embraces the story's excesses instead of feeling they need to be swept under a metaphorical rug.

A great movie is always a bit of a mystery, and that creative mystery is missing from the center of Haynes's Mildred Pierce, which cannot be faulted for craft or intelligence, but cannot be felt on the gut level of Cain, Crawford, or Curtiz, who might not have had a thought in his head about the story, but directs the hell out of it in pure visual and visceral movie terms.

I did love Mildred Pierce, mostly, for much of its nearly six hours.

The miniseries feels a little pokey in its early chapters, although it does an excellent job of establishing the primary characters, and then races too quickly toward its conclusion (wait, who is Mildred married to now?).

If you feel like you would like Mildred Pierce, in other words--if this kind of period piece is catnip to you--then I bet you will love Mildred Pierce. If not--well, at least, you might admire Haynes' enthusiasm.

Haynes takes a few melodramatic moments too many feet over the top--the injuring of Veda's throat, for example, which rises into an almost laughable delirium. But those excesses are forgivable in this otherwise masterful, faithful, and deluxe adaptation.

Not everyone is going to respond to its purposeful languor and subliminal intent. Winslet is at once wonderful and yet enigmatically blank--very much as written in Haynes's and Jon Raymond's screenplay.