Kritiken

Insensitive to any and all tenderness—and hypersensitive to imperfection—Faye-as-Joan is a perfect bitch and an absolutely flawless lunatic, which makes her as good at being an icon as it makes her awful at being a parent. If the Crawford mouth—a red, Fontana canvas slash of a maw—does not convey the image of a mother or a woman, it may be because Joan Crawford never wanted to be either: only a big, indelible star.

The director Frank Perry, working with his first wife, Eleanor Perry, and other screenwriters, is distinguished mainly by his skill at eliciting enticingly florid yet intimately vulnerable performances from actors. It's no surprise that he made one of the best films about a Hollywood star that the industry has yet produced.

It's telling that this film, ostensibly an adaptation of a memoir of a mother and daughter, often comes to life whenever it abandons this pretense and revels in the intoxicating power of Dunaway's Joan. The best scenes of Mommie Dearest shouldn't be here structurally, as Christina couldn't have witnessed them, but they exemplify Dunaway's formal dexterity, which mimics Crawford's presentational acting and intensifies an editorial sense of the neurosis that empowered it.

It's actually a vivid and disturbing examination of child abuse, the perils of being a movie star, and of being the child of a star. And Perry uses the same cool, clean style as in DIARY OF A MAD HOUSEWIFE. His objective camera, usually at some distance from the action, makes Joan's outbursts of aggression and violence that much more unsettling.