Hedda Lettuce Presents: 'Mommie Dearest'

To be clear, the five-star rating is not for the film Mommie Dearest. That movie I’d give two-stars, and then I’d bump up another star for the sheer spectacle of Faye Dunaway swinging for the fences in her performance. Instead, this rating is for the:

• Great joy of watching anything in Village East’s primary screening room: a sumptuous throwback to movie palaces of yesteryear that is comparable, say, to the Castro in SF
• Great joy of watching drag queen Hedda Lettuce use a laser pointer to point out continuity errors, questionable fish ceramic decor, costuming excellence, and unmotivated plot. It’s Mystery Science Theatre 3000 with chicken cutlets
• Great joy for the Village East’s awesome popcorn

The Film

Mommie Dearest is the subject of legend. Here are some commonly-held assertions about it:

• Dunaway’s career was pretty much tanked by it
• Dunaway claims the direction had no vision for her
• The direction claims Dunaway had no ear for them
• no one associated with Dunaway in this movie ever wanted to work with her again.¹

Who knows who is right in that whole story? Who knows how it happened? Fact numero uno is this: this is one of the most unhinged, over-the-top performances ever committed to film, and it has to be seen to be believed. Whatever the plot, whoever is being portrayed, whatever is happening, the real star is the train-wreck of this performance.

It’s almost like some day before shooting, someone who wanted to end Faye Dunaway’s career sent out a memo to everyone-save-Dunaway saying: “We’re sick of her shit, let’s make her ridiculous by turning a dramatic vehicle into a camp classic. Help her play huge, you play small.“² It’s a junior high lunchroom or “mean, rich kids from the camp across the lake” stunt made real.

As for the subject matter, frankly, it’s a legitimate goddam tragedy when you do the cognitive lift of imagining the movie without the camp Leviathan of Dunaway’s performance infusing every frame. Anyone who’s survived or bears the weight of a broken parent/child relationship will feel some real moments of real tragedy and encounter some real scary ghosts during the runtime.³ Talk to someone who’s lived with mental illness and narcissism, and the infamous “No wire hangars” meltdown or “I’m not mad at you, I’m mad at the dirt” or “Figure it out” one-liners will take on some painful plausibility.

As Ryan noted in his review, the fact that the “Mommie” in question is the Hollywood icon Joan Crawford described by her daughter, Christina’s, tell-all book is pretty much incidental. You could have taken any high-achieving character back-story (e.g. Morning show anchor, champion baton twirler, chess champion) delivered that as prelude, and then shown Mommie Dearest with “Joan Crawford” as having that background and the plot would have worked. As Ryan rightly observed, the movie is terminally uncurious, basically a set of sketches of “Oooh, wow, let’s look at this unhinged performer make a scene involving an unhinged human.”

But from the two-star ashes of this melodrama, many wonderful things can and have sprung.

The Show

Given an emotionally-manipulative screenplay, filming and lighting that alternates between soap opera and horror, editing that says “Lol continuity,” and one of the most over-acted performances ever conceived, the level of cognitive and emotional dissonance created is perfect for comedy. Enter one Hedda Lettuce and her laser pointer.

Hedda does a quick 20-minute warm-up of the crowd and gave us the thumbnail backstory on Dunaway, the studio, “this was not made to be a comedy but the audience found it so during its first week in theatres,” etc. and then took a seat with a mic while the movie played.

Hedda is hilarious. She prompted us to shout out the iconic lines; she pointed out the continuity errors e.g. the magic growing and shrinking hair lengths during the hair-cutting scene; she pointed out the upcoming scenes' complete lack of motivation to great comic effect.

It’s really only through Hedda’s setup of “What would you do after you won the Oscar? Dinner with friends? Read a book? Catch up on sleep? No. Joan raids her daughter’s closet” that I realized that arguably the iconic low-point scene of the movie is on, what ought be, the evening of Joan’s highest moment. Again, when you can perform the Mensa-level gymnastics to consider what you’ve seen absent Dunaway, this script is tragedy; however, because Dunaway insists you never forget her presence, her performance, her, at every moment of this movie, bathos kneecaps pathos and drags you by your hair into this melodrama.

Hedda takes this show on the road, so if you have her coming to a town near you, it’s a great time.

Footnotes

1. Although it was this “tanking of career” that lead her to take the role of the antagonist in Supergirl, the subject of many late-80’s VHS runs in my childhood home, thanks to my sister. Also, let’s not ever forget how amazing Dunaway was in Network, Bonnie and Clyde and Chinatown.
2. I’ve seen some feminist reads of Mommie Dearest’s drama. It’s pointed out that Dunaway’s husband (at the time) has a producer credit because she’d brought him in for protection against the studio (with protection like that…). And, in general, things never go all that well for independent, feisty women who are viewed as interchangeable chattel via the studio. Consider just how many decades really famous women tolerated being part of the Weinstein org in the relatively “more-enlightened” 2000’s. Do we conjecture that the gender power-dynamic was better 20 years before that?
3. Hedda, for her part, in the warmup asked whether anyone in the audience grew up with a mom like “Joan” and several hands went up. “Why are you here? Some sort of masochistic pursuit of catharsis.” There were laughs afterward, but like most laughs during the Mommie Dearest runtime, laughs that hit a little too close to the bone