Mildred Pierce

Joan Crawford won her Oscar as Mildred Pierce, the title role in the 1945 Warner Bros adaptation of James M.Cain's novel about a single mother's personal struggles, class-awareness and business success during the Depression. The classic noir film, which added murder to the tale of a disastrous mother-daughter relationship, was part-written by William Faulkner, directed by Michael Curtiz and co-starred young Oscar nominee Ann Blyth as the restaurateur's scheming daughter.

The 2011 remake of Mildred Pierce, directed by co-writer/producer Todd Haynes, was given a great cast including Guy Pearce, Melissa Leo, Hope Davis, Evan Rachel Wood as the daughter and Kate Winslet in the title role. Faithful to the novel, to an extreme possible only in a mini-series, the HBO TV saga ran for more than five hours. Is it too much of a good thing?

It's almost impossible to get too much of Winslet, a charismatic actress who's maturing gracefully. Unfortunately, she cannot do evil intent convincingly: her Mildred is incredibly naive, and ludicrously doting on her vile elder daughter. There are moments when Winslet's Mildred is angry, upset and imperious, but never enough to hint at genetic traits that might have produced spitefully egocentric, snobbish and vicious Veda. She can only be viewed as a devil's spawn, because her father is a sweet-natured weak-willed unfaithful building contractor (self-effacing Irish actor Brian F.O'Byrne, probably the miniseries' most likely Emmy winner).

For the first three of the miniseries' five episodes, 14-year-old Veda is played by 11-year-old Morgan Turner, with a hi-falutin accent and prissy airs tolerated to an unbelievable extent by her parents. Only her two music tutors recognise and slap down her conceit.

When her father moves out, at Mildred's insistence, and her young sister dies of flu while their mother is meeting a caddish new beau from the right side of town (Guy Pearce), Veda can dominate Mildred even more, but the script doesn't focus clearly on their generation gap. Instead, Haynes' focal point is Mildred's expanding restaurant and pie-making businesses.

In the 1945 version, Cain's 1930s melodrama was transformed into a murder mystery. It may have been done to satisfy Hollywood codes about evil earning justice, but it also added a strong narrative punch to an otherwise maudlin family tale. Haynes drops the murder (which I really wanted for several lead characters) and finds his visual punches in gratuitously nude love-making scenes. He also indulges in too many long pans and slow tracking shots, flaunting the production's extensive period settings, indoors and out and about in Glendale and Pasadena, crowded scenes of costumed extras, and a frequent parade of chugging vintage cars.

Haynes' Far From Heaven, starring a memorable Julianne Moore as another independent-minded woman of period character, was reportedly an homage to Douglas Kirk's lush directorial style. Mildred Pierce follows suit, apparently, and it is a beauty to behold, but it's a beauty stretched beyond its natural length. To points where the narrative framework is over-exposed and the characters' incredibility is glaring. This Mildred is just a silly mother, not a tragic figure.