We’re finishing up the winter movie viewing season with the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce starring Kate Winslet. So far we’ve watched disc 1, the first three episodes, with two more to go. But I am spending today on a bus, so thought I’d get my thoughts down about why this series, and particularly the character of Mildred Pierce, is so interesting.
So far, I’m impressed. This version, unlike the 1945 film that won Joan Crawford an Oscar and is her signature role, sticks closely to the book. It’s a complex look at gender and class and it’s hard to tell where one is supposed to stand on the issue of Mildred Pierce.
From what I’ve seen so far, she is heroic. She starts out at the beginning of the Depression with a filandering husband who has no work (he was a successful residential developer before the Depression). After she kicks him out, she has to find a way to support herself and her two daughters. This is a novel idea for a woman of her class and very difficult given the times.
Her own class prejudice shows as she learns she has no qualifications for work except her domestic skills (the very sign of her privilege now keeps her from office work) and she even throws up at the thought of being a waitress.
However, she dedicates herself to being a successful waitress and ends up winning the respect of those who are good at it, all the while observing the business and making plans to start her own restaurant. She’s ambitious and hard-working, and a very good cook, and she makes a go of it.
She’s also, well, loose. Her husband is barely out the door when she takes up with a humorous and unlikely lover, his business partner. This scene, however, also shows the precariousness of her position. As soon as this man, Wally, learns her husband is gone, he starts putting the moves on her. I mean immediately. It’s humorous, but her equally privileged friend, who is not a good cook, suggests that “being kept” is a perfectly good solution to her financial problems. To pull it off, she’s going to need liquor, an investment in the business of taking lovers.
Mildred meets Monty Baragon in the diner on her last day before heading off into business for herself and runs off for a weekend with him in Santa Barbara. One can’t help but think this is a deep character flaw that will lead to her downfall. But when her ex-husband and Wally first meet Baragon, well, they’re impressed that she’s landed him. She didn’t even know how wealthy and famous he was. Rather than promiscuity, it seems a coup.
She and her ex-husband remain on good terms. Even in the midst of tragedy, they come together, and he’s there to celebrate opening night of her restaurant. Wally becomes her business partner.
Monty Baragon soon loses his money and now Mildred’s keeping him: buying his clothes, paying his polo club fees, etc. The men seem to blame her for emasculating them, but they also seem unable to muster any resources to care for themselves and get back on their feet. Her ex-husband is still living with his mistress, “Mrs. Biederhoff,” and Monty seems happy to take her money. But he accuses her of being “a certain kind of woman,” not having class, for making him feel guilty about the money and for enlisting him to help out with her daughter, Vida, as if to get her “money’s worth.”
Vida. Ah, Vida. My first encounter with Mildred Pierce was definitely the Carol Burnett parody, and so in my mind it is about stormy cliffs, an arch Joan Crawford, and the evil, spoiled monster of a child who is Vida. Vida has the class prejudice her mother seems to have had in the beginning of the film, but on her it seems purely ugly and destructive. She is insolent and impertinent, yet for some reason her parents want to see her as talented and of a higher order than other people. They want to spare Vida the Depression, shield her from any loss in status.
As many of the characters say, in language that is familiar today, the economy will eventually turn around and life will be good again—for the rich. The men maybe aren’t being lazy so much as they’re just waiting out the economic downturn. That Mildred is a fan of Roosevelt while the others see him as wanting to tax the rich to support those who supposedly don’t want to work not only has resonance with today’s politics, it puts Mildred on the right side of history.
Vida is, then, a rather Gothic creature. She is the ills of her class and gender on display. The false ideas of privilege and beauty are distorted into her slatternly attitude and appearance. As an adolescent on Christmas morning with a big bow in her hair and make-up, smoking a cigarette as she confronts her mother for not buying her a grand piano (the money her mother was saving for it went to help Monty), Vida is a caricature in an otherwise complex set of characters. She has none of our sympathy.
Her mother even seems to see the problem. Her father supports Mildred, saying Vida is completely unreasonable for expecting a piano and not being grateful for the watch she gets instead. When pushed, Mildred slaps Vida yet again, but in the end she seems unable to let go of the ideology that fuels Vida, that somehow wealth and privilege are her birthright and others are just messing things up or letting her down.
This is where we have paused.
A review I read described Kate Winslet’s portrayal of Mildred Pierce as “one-note and miserable,” but I don’t see that at all. Winslet could be stronger, maybe, but she does an excellent job of showing how conflicted this woman is, and also how smart and brave. What could be a critique of her nurturing falls flat, since it is clear she is the only one keeping things going for everyone else! What is needed here is money—for food, schooling, piano lessons, the roof over their head. She manages to work hard and be creative about it, not just surviving but prospering. I can’t see how that is miserable.
That she slaps Vida one moment and embraces her the next (something I vaguely remember from the Burnett parody as well) is a sign of her conflicted nature. She wants “the best” for her daughter, but can’t seem to see that this idealized “best” is twisted and destructive. What she is in reality is actually the best—but maybe this is too contemporary a notion.
The example of a competent, independent, hard-working and successful woman who is nonetheless still sexy and desirable, well, that’s really something, is it not? Her work doesn’t turn her into a drudge—she can rock a satin gown like nobody’s business. Her morality (mixed as it is) does not make her either irresponsible (despite a misguided attempt in episode two to show her as such) or a bad mother.
In the end, it seems that breaking out of the mold cast for her, while at the same time espousing the values of the mold that could only have led her to destitution or putting up with a playboy husband, is what does Mildred in. If she could only embrace and somehow commit to the values of the life she is forced to lead by circumstance, instead of longing for the old way—at least in terms of what she wants for her daughter—she could escape the fate that surely awaits her.
I know the series doesn’t go the way of the original movie, which added a murder that wasn’t in the book and turned it into a noir mystery told in flashbacks. Maybe Mildred will wind up better in this version, and maybe Vida will get her come-uppance. But even not knowing what will happen next, I am utterly taken by the complexity and conflict of this character, who has wiped away images of Crawford and Burnett entirely from view.