Midnight In Paris

Midnight In Paris is the essence of recent Woody Allen in its purest form. This is a charming love letter to Paris, which opens with a series of crisply photographed, perfectly colored postcard images of Paris as a collection of tourist landmarks and street scenes that are familiar from the countless French movies they've appeared in. It's a glossy depiction of the latest destination on Woody's touristy trip through Europe, and this city in particular, Paris, seems to mean a great deal to him, as perhaps the place that appeals the most nakedly to the hopeless romantic in Woody.

The film hits all the usual Woody notes. Gil (Owen Wilson) is a successful screenwriter who's dissatisfied with his work and wants to be a serious novelist. He's in Paris with his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams), who he's feeling increasingly disconnected from, while his love of the city, his association of it with art and creativity, reawakens his dormant literary ambitions. This effect is intensified when Gil, sitting on a staircase around midnight, soaking in the atmosphere of Paris, is picked up by an old-fashioned car and transported back in time, to exactly the 1920s Parisian paradise that he'd been dreaming of. He is soon at parties with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill), Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), and many other luminaries of the multinational Paris cultural scene of the 20s. At a party, Cole Porter sings sadly and beautifully at the piano, flappers dance, and everything seems bathed in the golden glow of nostalgia. And then there's the lovely Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a young woman who's been a lover and muse for many painters of the time, most recently Pablo Picasso (Marcial di Fonzo Bo), and who Gil instantly falls for.


It's a very simple story, with a fantasy hook that delivers the very simple point that we always yearn for an ideal past that we never experienced and that never really existed. Such desires are an escape, an outlet for anxieties about the present, rooted in the inescapable feeling that if only one had been born earlier, or elsewhere, everything would feel so much more right. Woody realizes that this is a somewhat misguided desire but he can't help feeling it anyway, and he lovingly depicts 1920s Paris as a beautiful, perfect, charming place, even while gently nudging Gil towards the realization that the past can't offer solutions for the problems of the present. The film seems torn in two, its aesthetics delivering an unadulterated ode to the beauty and joys of the past while thematically it has to lead Gil to a place where he's happy to exist in the present, to live and create in his own time instead of aching for a past that will always seem sweeter than the familiar present.

Of course, it's no surprise that Woody is much more convincing in selling the past than the present. A big part of the film's pleasure comes from the offhanded sense of awe that Gil feels when he realizes that he's been pulled back in time, and his wide-eyed joy when encountering each new famed cultural figure of the past. Woody obviously has a lot of fun with depicting all these historical icons, who are surely the director's idols as much as they are Gil's. The best and most memorable of these personae is no doubt Stoll's perfectly pitched performance as Hemingway, who speaks exactly like he writes, in a clipped, assertive, no-nonsense tone that leaves little room for debate or uncertainties. He seems like the Hemingway we might imagine from his writing, come to life, speaking a perfectly phrased short story every time he opens his mouth, unleashing a series of terse, blunt phrases connected by chains of "and." Similarly effective, though in a much different mode, is Adrien Brody's Salvador Dalí, who mutters and slurs in multilingual argot and repeatedly announces his famous surname, always with an implied exclamation point and a grand sweep of his arm. He also introduces Gil to his friends Man Ray (Tom Cordier) and Buñuel (Adrien de Van), and Woody, hilariously, has Gil give Buñuel a movie plot idea, describing the surrealist premise of The Exterminating Angel, which puzzles Buñuel as much as it's puzzled and provoked audiences since he made it. It's a bit of a cutesy time travel gag but a charming one anyway.


It's a shame that the modern story is comparatively slighted. Inez is distant and self-absorbed, and she and Gil are so clearly ill-suited for one another that it's hard to imagine how they ever got together. Her parents are used primarily for a few offhanded and easy-target swipes at Tea Party Republicans and Woody's favorite topic, clueless Americans. Woody at least seems to realize that he's being insufferable: right after Gil calls Republicans "lunatics" during a rambling rant about politics, he adds that it's okay, he can still respect those who don't think like him. Gil's present-day romantic resolution at the end of the film is also pretty unsatisfying, but maybe that's just because Cotillard's Adriana is so luminous, so sweet and smoldering, that nothing in the present seems very alluring in comparison, even Léa Seydoux's pretty but vague love interest. Maybe that's what Woody is going for here: a particular time is not tempting, ultimately, because of when it is, but because of who is there, because of the connections that one forms with other people. What Gil really learns, through his immediate and visceral connection with Adriana, is that what was lacking in his present was not necessarily a result of his era but the (lack of) genuine connections in his life.

This is a sweet, warm movie, much brighter and airier than anything Woody's made in a while. It's funny, too, though mostly at the expense of the hapless sorts who Woody sets up as targets for his mockery: the pompous Paul (Michael Sheen), who professes to be an expert on everything, and a private detective who Woody gives a minimal role seemingly just to set up the film's best and funniest throwaway time travel joke. As a bit of a meta joke, Woody even has Carla Bruni, the First Lady of France herself, appear as a tour guide, adding to the sense of this film as Woody's guide to Paris. Midnight In Paris is Woody at his most charming and romantic, quite a change from the darker, more cynical tone that's dominated most of his more recent films, both the successes like Vicky Cristina Barcelona and the more uneven efforts. It's a delicious confection, a magical realist treat that's all but impossible to resist.

Rango

The neat trick of Gore Verbinski's Rango is the way it wraps some rather adult themes (and adult references) around a pretty basic kids' movie structure. The film follows the titular chameleon, voiced by Johnny Depp, as he falls out of a moving car and stumbles into the desert, where he encounters an adventure right out of a spaghetti western. The film is packed with hip references, like an early blink-and-you'll-miss-it Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas visual gag, and more notably the obvious influence of the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood "Man with No Name" trilogy. Those films loom large here, as Rango arrives in a dusty frontier town populated with various grizzled species of anthropomorphic animals. Rango, who inhabited a lively fantasy world to stave off loneliness in his small tank, now presents himself as a wandering mercenary hero, ready to help the townspeople, who are suffering from a drought that threatens to eliminate their water supplies. The plot combines the Leone films with, improbably, Roman Polanski's Chinatown and its schemes over water rights.

The plot, however, is not the film's strong point by any means. Despite the sophisticated reference points, the film's narrative is a bit of a jumble, and Verbinski leans too heavily on cliché when he's not nodding to his more venerable influences. When one mid-film action sequence devolves into a noisy, silly war film parody complete with "Ride of the Valkyries" — probably the most tired musical choice it's possible to make in a movie these days — it underscores how rapidly the film veers between clever pastiche and rote regurgitation.


It's easy to forgive and forget the more unimaginative stretches, however, when Verbinski packs the fringes of the film with such a wealth of visual wit and interesting ideas. When Rango first arrives in the desert, he encounters an armadillo (Alfred Molina) who has been run over on the highway but is somehow still alive and talking as though nothing has happened. This is especially disconcerting because there's a giant truck-tire-sized cutout in the animal's midsection, but the armadillo simply wants Rango to push the two halves of his body back together again. It's a disconcerting image, particularly for a movie supposedly made for kids, and an image that suggests the twin poles of surrealism and mortality that will serve as important motifs throughout the film.

Indeed, Rango is curiously obsessed with death. A trio of musical birds provide the vibrant, Morricone-esque soundtrack for the film, while also appearing onscreen as a Greek chorus narrating Rango's adventures. From the beginning, the birds suggest that this is going to be the story of the life and death of a hero, and they begin to seem strangely disappointed when the hero continually faces death and fails to die. At one point, the birds even deliver their grim predictions while hanging from nooses. The film's biggest threat, the tremendous, vicious Rattlesnake Jake (Bill Nighy), claims to come from Hell, and his fiery eyes and seeming willingness to kill suggests that there's some truth to the claim. The grislier aspects of the film sit uncomfortably against its sillier moments and its concensions to kids' movie conventions, like the plucky love interest (Isla Fisher) and the unbearably cutesy kid (Abigail Breslin) who does pretty much nothing and serves no purpose, throughout the movie, besides saying cute things in a cute voice and batting her huge eyes.

There's tension here, because the film sometimes seem to want to offer little more than this kind of predictable, jokey entertainment, but sometimes it seems to want to tell a much more serious story. It's a story about loneliness (on the personal level for the misfit Rango, a lifetime loner who creates his own entertainment with imaginary friends because he's never had real ones) and about the costs of modernization and the impotence of common people faced with powerful political and economic interests. The latter story, the big picture social story that's derived from the example of Chinatown, crops up periodically, most powerfully perhaps when Rango discovers the body of the town's bank manager, killed and cast aside in the rush for progress. Like all the best Westerns, this is a film about the West facing its end, about the push to tame the frontier. But the theme is never fleshed out very much, so that even at the end of the film, the exact nature of the plot cooked up by the film's obvious-from-the-start villain, the turtle mayor (Ned Beatty), is somewhat unclear, and he's left to spit out rote expositional dialogue to emphasize his villainy.


If the film's plot is sometimes less than coherent, broken up by embarassing digressions like the "Ride of the Valkyries" scene, Verbinski compensates with other pleasures. Rango's first night in the desert is visualized by a charmingly surrealist dream sequence populated by a talking windup goldfish and a disembodied Barbie torso, his only "friends" from his solitary existence. Later, in the film's best and most memorable scene, Rango actually meets the Man with No Name himself, a cartoonized Clint Eastwood (actually voiced by Timothy Olyphant) dressed in the distinctive poncho he wore in his Leone films. It's a wonderful meta moment, an explicit acknowledgment of Rango's affectionate tribute to the Leone/Eastwood collaborations. Eastwood's appearance provides a good example of the film's animation quality, too, since the caricature is instantly recognizable as the iconic actor, his face deeply lined and worn like a grizzled, aging Western hero, squinting and sneering as he dispenses advice to the tiny lizard he's inspired.

The animation is generally gorgeous in general. Not all of the character designs are as expressive and satisfying as the depictions of the Man With No Name and Rango himself, but the animation is unceasingly lovely, and all of the characters are textured and detailed so that they never seem like molded plastic (as, for example, the highly praised Pixar's human figures often do). There are plenty of visually sumptuous moments along the way, brief sequences where the action pauses to simply admire the scenery. A posse ride through the desert is particularly jaw-dropping, as the sunset desert scenery looks simultaneously realistic and colorfully stylized. The iconography of the Western is lovingly referenced in the visuals, from a shadowy figure appearing out of the shimmering heat haze of the desert to a group of riders galloping against the huge orange half-circle of the setting sun.

Rango is in many respects an interesting, if somewhat schizophrenic, work with the ambition to marry some big ideas to a rather conventional underlying structure. At its best, the film is visually dazzling, witty and a tribute worthy of the spaghetti Western influences it wears on its sleeve. At it's worst, it's cloying, overbearing kiddie fare, and those two sides of its personality are never quite resolved. Still, the film has enough ambition, smarts and style to make it a mostly enjoyable entertainment that occasionally reaches for something more.

The Conversations #26 (part 2): The Tree of Life

If you've seen Terrence Malick's latest film, The Tree of Life, chances are that you're as eager as Jason Bellamy and I have been to discuss, dissect and analyze this rich, dense, sometimes frustrating but always fascinating movie. In part 2 of our discussion of Malick, following up on our previous conversation about his first four films, we turn our attention to his latest film, which may well be his most ambitious yet. It's certainly a film about which there is a lot to say, and Jason and I doubtless only scratch the surface in our conversation, so be sure to join us in the comment section with your own thoughts.

Continue reading at The House Next Door

Mildred Pierce (episodes 4-5)

episodes 1-2 | episode 3 | episodes 4-5

In the final two episodes of Todd Haynes' HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce, the story leaps forward in time several years after the previous episode ended with a decisive break between Mildred (Kate Winslet) and her high society lover Monty Beragon (Guy Pearce). In the ensuing years, Mildred's business has flourished and expanded, and she now has two additional restaurants as a part of her empire, run by her friends. Mildred's daughter Veda has grown up, too, a detail that Haynes lovingly lingers over during the early scene where Mildred returns home to find Veda playing the piano in the living room. The girl is only seen from behind at first, as Haynes' camera glides through the house, following Mildred as she putters about, the images recalling the scenes from earlier episodes of Veda practicing her piano. But this is not the snotty little brat of the first three parts of the series, this is Veda all grown up into a predatory diva, played by Evan Rachel Wood. And just as she was as a child, Veda is still the center of Mildred's life, the whole reason for her existence. Throughout these often devastating, potent final two and a half hours of the miniseries, Veda's dominance of Mildred's life becomes the focus of the film as well, and in the process it begins to seem like Haynes is critiquing the foundations of motherhood itself.

Mildred's story, after all, is the story of the costs of motherhood. Again and again, Mildred sacrifices everything for Veda. At a certain point, after a tremendous argument, Veda moves out of her mother's home, and Mildred spends the rest of her time trying to get her daughter back, trying to win the affection of this girl who is very appropriately compared to a rare and beautiful — but deadly — snake. Mildred allows her business to flounder, her attention wavering from her previous single-minded dedication to having a prosperous career. The whole reason for her business in the first place was to impress Veda, to be able to provide for Veda, and with Veda gone Mildred no longer seems like the strong, determined businesswoman that she once was.

Mildred also gets back together with Monty after randomly encountering him on a street corner, waiting for a bus — he's "between cars," he says, maintaining his high society composure even now that his fortunes have fallen even further. Their relationship initially seems like an improved version of their original fling. The passion is there, and Mildred's desire for Monty is reawakened once she's back in his presence. There's real if unlikely chemistry between them, and Haynes uses it as an opportunity for another very lurid sex scene: it's not often that one sees a shot of a man's head buried between a woman's legs in a staid period picture. The couple gets married, and Monty seems to have changed in substantial ways from his earlier affair with Mildred. In a key scene for his character, he shows Mildred a room he's arranged for her, decorated with mementos of her daughter and her restaurant; he delivers a moving and seemingly sincere speech about how much he admires rooms that reveal something of their owners, rooms where each object means something to those who inhabit them, and he expresses a wish to make this kind of life with Mildred. It's a very touching moment, and a genuine one, a moment that suggests that Monty has matured, that he really wants to create that happy, meaningful life with Mildred.


That touching moment of potential with Monty, the moment when it briefly seems as though a happy ending might actually be possible for this improbable couple, lingers over the remainder of the film, and makes what happens subsequently even more heartbreaking. Once Veda is back in Mildred's life, it's as though Monty has served his purpose, just as the business has served its purpose, and Mildred ignores each of them more and more. Mildred begins to seem less like the strong independent woman she had once been and more like a overbearing mother who's living through her daughter's life and accomplishments. In one scene, Monty tells Mildred that he'll be sleeping alone, leaving her to stay up late with Veda, and Mildred jokes, "I guess we're just middle-aged," but as Monty walks away down a long, shadowy hallway, shrouded in darkness, it seems obvious that he's not so flippant about his increasing (and rapid) marginalization in this marriage.

Mildred, however, seems more concerned with her daughter, since as Mildred calculated, Veda returns to her mother's life after the marriage, lured by the society wedding and the newly redecorated Pasadena mansion, so remote from the suburban Glendale mediocrity that Veda so despised as a girl. Veda, during her time away from home, has somewhat improbably become a classical opera singer after failing as a pianist, finally displaying the talent that Mildred had always sensed was in the girl. When Mildred first hears Veda sing, she's with Bert, listening to the radio, and Haynes' camera circles around the radio, focusing on the speaker and the sound mysteriously emanating from it, emphasizing the strange disconnection of this moment, the way Veda's voice emerges from the ether, the daughter who Mildred so desperately needs and hasn't seen in months suddenly crying and howling from the radio in airy, high-pitched trills. It becomes too much for Mildred: she walks away, standing by a dock in a composition that echoes a similar one from the 1945 Joan Crawford version of Mildred Pierce, although for Haynes it's not a melodramatic moment of near-suicide but a quiet interlude of contemplation.

Later, in the miniseries' biggest set piece, Mildred, Bert and Monty go to see Veda perform at the Philharmonic, a grand debut that Mildred watches with an expression somewhere between incomprehension and terror. She doesn't even look happy; she looks like she's watching a horror movie, on the verge of tears, over-awed by her daughter's talent, unable to understand how these sounds are emanating from her longtime object of fixation. At one point, Mildred borrows a pair of opera glasses, and Haynes inserts a shot of the view through the binoculars, magnifying Veda's face to reveal the sneering, angry expressions on her face as she sings, as though she's pulling her voice up from some deep, dark place within her, expressing her rage through these beautiful but demanding songs. Mildred looks away almost immediately, unable to deal with that, and she much prefers the encore when Veda unexpectedly sings a song that's implicitly meant for her mother, a song she knows her mother loves, and ends it by blowing a kiss. It's a tender gesture that might also be a sarcastic one, prefaced by an acknowledgment that she knows her mother's song doesn't belong on a Philharmonic program, just as she knows that her mother doesn't belong in the upper class.


All of this sets the stage for the harrowing and unforgettable climactic scene, a masterpiece of staging, in which Mildred finds Veda and Monty in bed together. Haynes really lets the long-bubbling Freudian psychosexual subtexts come raging to the surface at this point, as Mildred slumps against the wall, her mouth slack, her eyes disbelieving and wide, looking at her daughter languidly stretched out naked in bed. Wood's performance is at its over-the-top best here, cutting loose with this chilly girl's sneering, sinister slinkiness. As her mother breaks down in shock and Monty quickly recovers his suave act, Veda becomes downright evil, the full flowering of the nasty, self-motivated, manipulative evil that had shown up in flashes previously but is really unleashed here. She casually lights and smokes a cigarette, lying in bed, the blankets loosely draped over her, falling off her shoulders, smiling her cold smile. And then, in a moment of transcendent horror, she gets up out of the bed, deliberately allowing the blankets to fall away from her long, thin — snakelike — body, and walks naked across the room, parading her body in front of her mother, then sits in front of the mirror, still nude, combing her hair. It's an eerie, dreamlike scene, a nightmare in the flesh. Veda is provoking her mother, displaying herself to her, and the moment resonates with the earlier one in which Mildred had given her sleeping daughter a kiss on the lips that was more sapphic than motherly. This bedroom confrontation is a chilling, provocative sequence, a scene of high gothic melodrama that, in retrospect, Haynes' entire series was building towards.

That's the emotional crescendo of the entire miniseries, and it's very powerful, deliberately upstaging the staid, censorship-bound similar scene in the 1945 Hollywood Mildred Pierce. Haynes, sticking close to the James M. Cain source novel, avoids the murder mystery genre plotting from the Joan Crawford movie, but his film's climax is even more lurid, even more melodramatic, rising to operatic excesses to stage this horrific primal scene. The whole sequence ends with another striking composition, after Mildred has choked Veda, straining the girl's singing voice. Veda runs downstairs, clothed now only in a thin silk robe, staggers to the piano, crouches on the bench to bang out a few discordant notes, croaking awfully, then collapses to the ground beside a puddle of her own vomit. Haynes holds the terrible, emotionally devastating, ugly moment in a long shot, encompassing the shadowy high-ceilinged room with Veda collapsed in the background, Mildred standing in the middleground, and Monty in the foreground looking on in shock. It's a harrowing moment, and contrasted against the meticulous period detail and quotidian reality that dominate the rest of the series, it's as though Mildred has suddenly been plunged into an abyss, hurtling out of her average suburban lifestyle into a psychosexual nightmare.

Following this scene, Mildred has nowhere to go but back into the comforting arms of her first husband, Bert (Brian O'Byrne), and the ordinary suburban existence they once enjoyed. She flees from her daughter, from her business ambitions, from her social climbing rise into the upper class, and returns to boring, prosaic Glendale and the boring, prosaic marriage she'd once fled. The Hollywood film played this marital reconciliation as a happy ending, if a perfunctory one, but Haynes allows the full impact of this turn of events to resonate. It all ends with Bert's hollow insistence that everything will be alright, that they've got each other, and all the while there's such earnest desperation in his face, in the way he urgently pours two glasses of liquor for them. "Let's get stinko," he says, and Mildred repeats it for the last line of the film. And then she shoots the camera a gaze of such teary, red-eyed despair that it becomes instantly apparent that things are not alright, that this is not a Hollywood happy ending, that this couple has got years of drunken denial and disconnection still ahead of them.

Mildred Pierce (episode 3)

episodes 1-2 | episode 3 | episodes 4-5

The third episode of Todd Haynes' new Mildred Pierce miniseries opens in the immediate wake of the second episode's tragic conclusion. The younger daughter of Mildred (Kate Winslet) died at the end of the second episode, which concluded with a discrete pan away from Mildred embracing her surviving daughter Veda (Morgan Turner), and the third part of the series doesn't gloss over this grief but draws it out, lingering lovingly and sadly over the details. In the opening shot, Haynes' camera pans across Veda's sunlit room, the morning after the last episode's conclusion, and the sunny cinematography, the bright child's toys and decorations, are enough to suggest that maybe it was all a bad dream, until the moment when Mildred's gaze lands on the empty bed of her other daughter, at the same moment as Haynes guides the audience's gaze to the same spot.

In the subsequent scenes, Mildred balances her grief against the practicality and determination that constitute her essential nature; even when she's at her darkest moment, sobbing and despairing, she has the presence of mind to think of the need for a black dress. Haynes frames this moment in one of the through-a-window shots that characterize his style in Mildred Pierce, with Mildred's husband Bert (Brian O'Byrne) in the foreground and Mildred in the background with her friend Lucy (Melissa Leo), discussing her dress size and whether she should wear a veil or not. Soon, Mildred must lay out the clothes her daughter will wear to be buried, and she carefully lays out the clothes on the bed, smoothing out the wrinkles in a dress and placing a pair of socks down one by one. After the funeral, Haynes mirrors this sequence with a shot of Mildred similarly laying out her funereal black dress, straightening it out and hanging it up in the closet, putting it away as though she could put away her grief so neatly. In its quiet, methodical way, this opening is more devastating than a more showy, melodramatic evocation of grief, because it's so horrifyingly normal.

The emotions enter a more melodramatic register later in the episode, but Haynes' emphasis on details remains a constant presence. As in the first two parts of the series, Haynes keeps calling wry attention to the economics of the time, as even after Mildred gets her restaurant up and running, she still has to keep careful track of her money, counting every dollar. More than the first episodes of the series, Depression-era politics linger in the background here, with political speeches playing on radios and the end of Prohibition triggering changes for Mildred's business. The economics of the time are also at the forefront, as Haynes again takes every opportunity to demonstrate how much things cost at this time, taking particular ironic pleasure in a stop to a gas station where a full tank of gas costs a little over a dollar.


The bulk of this pivotal episode, however, focuses on the relationship between Mildred and the fading society heir Monty Beragon (Guy Pearce), who has retained his status and the significance of his family name even while losing all of his money. As he result, he takes money from Mildred even while looking down on her, mocking her status as a lowly working woman. In that, he has a co-conspirator in Veda, who has her own pretensions of upper-class privilege, and who naturally rejoices at Monty's presence in her mother's life. The scenes between Monty and Mildred dominate this episode, as their initially passionate and intense relationship is corrupted by Monty's disdain for work, and his contempt for Mildred's working class lifestyle. In several scenes, the couple argues, trading cutting words as Mildred begins to realize that Monty is not the man she thought he was, until Monty defuses the situation by seducing Mildred.

Despite it all, Mildred still desires him, and Monty knows that at this point, sex is the one thing he still has to offer — though he jokes that he's a gigolo, it often seems to be more or less true. These scenes are painful to watch, to see this strong woman, who's worked so hard and dealt with so much, brought down by this guy who's outwardly smooth and suave but actually quite pathetic. The thing is, Mildred, unlike so many other movie incarnations of the "strong woman," doesn't turn off or suppress her sexuality in the name of her career or her family — she might be making the wrong choice with Monty, but she's making it because she remains a sexual woman throughout all of her troubles. Probably the most telling moment in that respect is the scene when Monty shows up at Mildred's restaurant, preceded by buzz and excitement over his presence, with Mildred's two other men, Bert and her business manager/lover Wally (James LeGros), wondering how such a high society legend heard about the restaurant. When Monty then casually enters the kitchen and addresses Mildred intimately and familiarly, bringing her flowers, Mildred turns and suppresses a wicked smile in a napkin. Rather than being embarrassed or awkward, she's thrilled, proud, showing off Monty like a conquest, taking pleasure in introducing him to Bert and Wally. There's a social-climbing aspect to this pleasure, sure, the thrill of having this access to high society that the others clearly envy, but it's also the thrill of showing off her sexual prowess.

Haynes ends the episode with Mildred finally rejecting Monty's advances, driving to see him and then back home again in a lovingly photographed thunderstorm that externalizes Mildred's anger and confusion. On the way there, toward Monty's spacious but disused mansion, where most of the rooms are closed up, the furniture covered in white sheets, the stormy night seems to glow with eerie headlights illuminating accident scenes and slick roads. On the way back, after Monty flippantly jokes about raping Mildred — she momentarily gives in only to push him off and run away — the night has become even more threatening, even more sinister. The night seems to close in on Mildred, dark and intense, the roads narrow and surrounded on all sides by dark tangles of trees and foliage that seem to press in on her. That's an appropriate place to end this transitional episode that bridges the gap between the opening two hours and the next (and final) two episodes, which promise to leap forward several years into the future. Haynes' Mildred Pierce continues, in its precise and evocative way, to ably balance the naturalism of Haynes' period details against the creeping melodrama that's starting to emerge from the character interactions.

Mildred Pierce (episodes 1-2)

episodes 1-2 | episode 3 | episodes 4-5

Todd Haynes' new HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce is a fresh adaptation of the James M. Cain novel that had previously been adapted for Michael Curtiz's 1945 film of the same name. Haynes' expansive five-part miniseries, the first two parts of which aired on Sunday as a single two-hour block, takes its cues from the novel, rather than from Curtiz's noirish, overheated Joan Crawford melodrama. In the process, this new version expands into a potent, sprawling epic of the Depression era woman. Mildred (Kate Winslet) is placed in a difficult situation when she finally pushes her no-good husband Bert (Brian O'Byrne) out the door, sick of his laziness and his philandering with another woman. Mildred becomes a "grass widow," caring for her daughters Veda (Morgan Turner) and Ray (Quinn McColgan) on her own, making do at first with the meager proceeds from selling homemade pies, while she searches for a job in an economy with very few real prospects.

The signal virtue of Haynes' film is its meticulous attention to the economic realities of its era. In countless small details in the first episode of the series, Haynes emphasizes how every penny, every nickel, every dime must be carefully managed. On Mildred's first shopping trip after her husband leaves, she places items into her basket, weighing each one in her hand as she looks at the price, and Haynes pulls in for a tight closeup on the shopping basket as she mentally calculates the total cost, finally discarding an item that would push her over her budget. Later, when she gets a job as a waitress, her new employers make a point of telling her that the cost of her uniform will be deducted from her first check, and that any discrepancies at her tables will also be deducted, and that she'll have to buy her own shoes. The costs tally up quickly. As Mildred tells Veda in the second episode, everything in their lives, everything they own, has a cost, and Haynes makes sure that that cost is felt concretely, that every penny of it feels like it matters.

Haynes is similarly meticulous with every aspect of the film. The 1930s setting is believably tangible without any showy period touches; there's simply a constant sense of physicality in such details as Mildred's drab and obviously cheap undergarments, or the fruit vendors lined up along a cobbled street, or the tattoos on the arm of a blood donor, suggesting that only a lower-class man would be donating blood in this society, in this era. Haynes evokes the era with a direct but stylish aesthetic, using mostly pale, muted colors that add to the sense of reality. He's constantly shooting through glass, through windows that slightly distort and filter the view outside, as when Mildred is seen, contemplating her dim economic prospects, through the filthy front window of a diner, her face made indistinct by the gray grime layered on the glass. This is a film that is very much about the economic realities of the Depression for a single woman trying to provide for herself and her family, so the film's verisimilitude is vitally important. It also definitively sets Haynes' adaptation of the Cain novel apart from the famous 1945 Joan Crawford film, which not only shifted the story's era from the Depression to the then-current mid-1940s, but also offered an overheated vision very far removed from the physical and emotional realism of Haynes' version.


In that respect, Kate Winslet's performance as Mildred is a key component of the film's effect. Comparisons to Crawford are perhaps inevitable, but misplaced since Winslet's performance is in an entirely different register from her predecessor in this role. There's no melodrama in Winslet's performance, no excess. It's a warm, nuanced embodiment of a woman who, in the early scenes of the film, simply and abruptly decides that she's sick of the life she's been living, and over the course of the first two episodes begins to realize what she'd like to replace that life with. The first shot of the film is a closeup on Mildred's hands as she prepares pies for baking; Haynes immediately thrusts the audience into Mildred's world, a world of work and effort. In the subsequent scene, what starts as a routine conversation between Mildred and Bert — one immediately senses that they've had similar tense discussions many times — goes off-track when Mildred unexpectedly and casually drops the name of the woman that she knows Bert has been going to see. It's a remarkable moment, the truth suddenly bubbling up from out of this routine marital conversation, and afterward Mildred doesn't even quite seem to realize why she forced this confrontation, she just knows that she's reached a breaking point. Maybe it's the casual way that Bert says, "I don't see what else I can do around here," the careful phrasing of which Haynes utterly mocks because the audience can easily see the dirty pans and dishes stacked around the kitchen, while Mildred sits at the table working on yet another pie.

The film provides plenty of opportunities for Winslet to portray the complexities of this remarkable woman. In one scene from the second episode, when Mildred and Bert discuss finally getting a divorce and making their separation official and permanent, their conversation covers a wide range of emotions. The splitting couple is initially acrimonious and on edge, exchanging harsh words about one another's choices in romantic partners — Mildred has become involved with Bert's former business partner Wally (James LeGros) — but they soon begin gently joking about their situation, trying to laugh it off, and in their banter is visible a glimmer of the attraction they once must have felt for each other. The moment of warmth and humor segues seamlessly into tears, with Mildred breaking down, her face screwed up in anguish. It's a wonderful scene, a powerful acting showcase for Winslet especially, and it suggests the broad emotional palette that Haynes is working with here, tapping into the rich essence of Mildred's story and mining it for genuine, heartfelt drama rather than overwrought melodrama.

In the final act of the first episode, Winslet's Mildred conveys a sense of utter horror and desperation as she comes to grips with the prospect of having to lower herself in status in order to provide for her family. This class consciousness is most powerfully felt in a scene where Mildred goes for an interview to work as a maid in the house of a rich woman. Again and again throughout this sequence, Haynes holds one uncomfortable moment after another, allowing several beats to go by as Mildred attempts to swallow her pride, to choke down the bile rising up within her middle-class soul at being treated like a lowly servant. It starts when she knocks on the front door of the house, gets one look from the black servant who answers the door, and is immediately told to go around to the back. The door slams in Mildred's face, and Haynes holds the shot of her standing there, stunned into immobility. He holds the shot again after Mildred meets with the woman of the house and is told that she can't sit down without being told, causing Mildred to look startled again and stand up. When a second later the woman tells Mildred to sit down, the way Mildred holds her body, rail-straight and poised, suggests her pride struggling within her, resisting these demands for obedience and subservience.


Mildred is a very proud woman, and also a very tough one, a woman both of her time and astonishingly modern, even now. The film's portrait of Mildred constantly suggests the tension between the modern woman she's being forced to become and the conventional housewife she'd perhaps once been. Part of this is a growing sense of practicality, accepting that becoming a waitress to feed her family is nothing to be ashamed of — though she still can't bring herself to reveal her new job to her daughter Veda, who has very un-practical ideas about social standing and propriety, setting the stage for the conflicts that will drive the later chapters of this saga.

Mildred's modernity is refreshingly conveyed in the scenes from the series' second episode in which she first meets the wealthy but terminally lazy Monty Beragon (Guy Pearce) and impulsively decides to accept his flirtatious invitation to join him at his beach house. The sex scene between the two newly acquainted lovers is earthy and intense, emphasizing the straining muscles in Monty's forearms as his hand rests on the bed, holding up his body. Haynes' camera drifts sensually across the lovers' bodies, exploring the junction points between them, emphasizing the sweaty and surprisingly unglamorous contact between the toned Monty (with his dark brown tan, a product of empty days with nothing to do but lay on the beach) and the middle-aged but still sexy and curvy Mildred. Haynes purposefully contrasts this passionate scene, and the relaxed post-coital conversation of the lovers, against Mildred's comparatively awkward and passionless encounters with Wally, who she falls into bed with out of mere convenience and confusion. Haynes plays the sex with Wally for laughs: Wally gropes Mildred and they stumble around the room, nearly collapsing onto the bed, and as Mildred putters around her room afterward, Wally sits on the bed, balancing an ashtray on his rounded belly, an irredeemable comic figure.

Of course, Mildred's beachside interlude with Monty is followed by the tragic and heartrending conclusion to the second episode — culminating in a very lengthy final shot, a sustained look at Mildred's grief before a discrete pan around the corner to a dark wall — but even before this ending, the scenes at the beach with Monty resonate as a contrast against the rest of the film. It's a moment when Mildred is lifted out of her working class life, freed from the responsibilities of work even if only for a day. In a way, that's what attracts her to Monty, as suggested by the expression of mingled excitement and disgust that flashes across her face when she realizes that Monty doesn't actually do anything in his life, merely cashes the dividend checks he receives from his inherited family business. For Mildred, that's a glimpse of a whole other life, far removed from the bustling world of the restaurant, from the kneading of dough to make pies, from the necessity of counting every cent that buys her groceries. It all comes back to that grounding in the economic realities of the era in which the film is set, its emphasis on what money — and the lack of it, and the desire for it — really means.