The very thing that was supposed to define Mommie Dearest is what can make it challenging to enjoy fully. 'Mommie Dearest' Shouldn't Be Funny, But It Is No idea what happened in-between, and if the book is anything to go by, there were plenty of torments that occurred in those intervening years that would have been relevant to the narrative. In one scene, Christina is sent to a convent school, and in the very next scene, she is leaving said school, with years having passed. In one scene, Joan is proving to a dismissive adoption agency just how wrong they are about calling her an unsuitable parent by being verbally and physically aggressive no more than one minute later, some doctor is dropping a new baby off at her house like he’s a pizza delivery boy. Don’t look for a through-line, or any sort of linearity. It is arranged like a children’s book, with an overabundance of three-page chapters that give the impression that content has been consumed. Mommie Dearest is not really structured like a real movie, but in a style that all too frequently permeates the biopic, rushes to condense decades of a notable person’s life into two hours.

She seems to have gone in with the idea of throwing everything at the wall problem is there was nobody there checking what stuck. But just as every great author needs a great editor, actors need great directors, and evidently she didn’t find this in Frank Perry. If anybody was serious about it, she was. It wasn’t a case of painting on the eyebrows and getting to set: Dunaway truly studied and honed the persona she considered to be Joan Crawford, even training her facial muscles to hold the way Crawford held her own famous face. She is an immensely talented actor, and takes her work very seriously, and as many method actors have been known to do, she threw herself into this role to the point that she began to lose herself. Not only did it tarnish the legacy of a well-respected actor, it transformed her into a posthumous caricature, and blurred the lines between the real Joan Crawford and the idea of her.įaye Dunaway was a brilliant choice for the lead role.

The fact that this came shortly after learning she had been cut from her mother's will did not go unnoticed, and some were outraged. However, shortly after her death in 1977, her adopted daughter Christina Crawford published a memoir titled Mommie Dearest, detailing her abuse at the hands of her mother. She was a fighter, who did whatever it took to carry on working in Hollywood and maintain a respectable public profile. Joan Crawford was a huge film star, defined by her striking good looks and razor-sharp work ethic.

Mommie dearest by christina crawford