剧情介绍
好莱坞女明星琼·克劳馥因无法生育，与情人格雷格领养了女婴克里斯蒂娜。随着克劳馥事业下滑，在因影片不卖座被制片公司开除后，她开始将怨气发泄在克里斯蒂娜身上，虐待日渐升级，不仅常施以暴力，还将她送进修道院与世隔绝。最终，克里斯蒂娜追随养母的脚步，也成为了一名女演员。影片揭示了这段扭曲的母女关系如何影响了克里斯蒂娜的人生选择。
短评
长评
[FilmReview]MommieDearest(1981)
Faye Dunaway’s Joan Crawford biopic MOMMIE DEAREST is a torpedo that completely deep-sixed the Oscar winner’s hitherto exalted career and after which her status never recovered. T...
Faye Dunaway’s Joan Crawford biopic MOMMIE DEAREST is a torpedo that completely deep-sixed the Oscar winner’s hitherto exalted career and after which her status never recovered. The film is mocked as a stinker of high camp, a mean-spirited ridicule of Ms. Crawford and a star’s vanity project hitting wide of the mark.
Indeed, the film is ghastly to look with its brassy production design under its televisual lighting (the Crawford mansion is a holdover of Hollywood golden era’s studio construction, but without the usual treatment of a silver sheen, it is grossly unappealing), which presents a glitzy drabness that is the antithesis of one’s preconception of Hollywood glamour. Its script, based on Crawford’s adopted daughter Christina’s massively popular tell-it-all autobiography, implies in the ending that the book could be Christina’s ultimate tit-for-tat after being disinherited in her mother’s will.
It stands to reason that there is a faint but distinct ghost of vilification and willful exploitation behind the whole story, which goes for the jocular to expose child abuse and bad parenting, the imbalance between careerism and parenthood, a movie star’s imponderable hubris and her throat-cutting aggression against patriarchy. In retrospect, MOMMIE DEAREST never intends to be pretty and glamorous, but grotesque and tumultuous, baring all its bad blood, petty grievances and accumulated rancor, which audience promptly takes as a scandalous exposé trying to color Ms. Crawford as an abomination of a mother.
That is when factual relativism kicks in, the account from Christina may not be the whole truth but it panders to the public’s curiosity of espying a celebrity’s personal demerits behind the closed doors, of which both Ms. Dunaway and director Frank Perry decide to make a production. Taking the example of the notorious “wire hanger” scenes, in default of any explanation of Joan’s aversion to wire hangers (something could be linked to her childhood hardship as her mother worked in a laundry shop, they rumple up clothes), MOMMIE DEAREST is guilty as charged to intentionally conjure up a freaky, irrational, hysterical monster out of Ms. Crawford.
Graced by the undiminished spotlight, Dunaway proves, once again, to be a screen powerhouse that can grab audience by the throat with her sheer presence and if eyebrows can kill, hers must be the most lethal. Her emotional intensity is up to the eleventh in objectifying Joan’s delusion, frustration and fighting spirit. And when Joan takes it all on a young Christina (Hobel is a feisty cherub does a cracking job of feigning being disciplined, wounded and traumatized), it is a cogent corroboration that motherhood isn’t for every member of the fairer sex.
As the adult Christina, Scarwid braves herself stoutheartedly to stand up against a Dunaway going apeshit as the two go physical in front of a visiting journalist (Brando, the last time she graces the silver screen), a flimsy plot machination cannot be credible. But how Christina’s horrid childhood experiences have altered her mentality and what are the consequences? That is the thorny essence conspicuously left untapped in Perry’s over-sensationalized melodrama.
referential entries: Frank Perry’s THE SWIMMER (1968, 7.0/10); James L. Brooks’ TERMS OF ENDEARMENT (1983, 7.8/10); Sydney Pollack’s THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975, 6.7/10).
UltharF
2023-04-19 00:18:43
福禄恩特
2022-06-17 04:31:32
发际线靠后
2021-11-19 09:54:41
迟到大王张大勇
2021-02-16 21:09:31
OPPY
2019-11-20 02:53:57
杉小爱|好姑娘,咱们走起来
2019-07-10 01:54:55