All that glitters isn’t gold even for Hollywood icons
FAYE
Sky Atlantic, from Friday
It’s a good hour into Faye, HBO’s stunning new documentary about Faye Dunaway before we get to a moment that I, and every other gay man who watches this, will be waiting for:
Mommie Dearest.
The biopic of Joan Crawford was Dunaway’s first significant role since Network, for which she’d won the Oscar for best actress in 1977.
After a career that had also included era-defining performances in Chinatown and Bonnie and Clyde there was no reason to suppose that this film of one movie star portraying another would be anything but another triumph. And yet the serious critics mauled it.
Public opinion in 1981 seemed to regard the film’s source material – Christina Crawford’s memoir of the abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother – as an unseemly airing of dirty laundry. The film was a relative failure at the box office and the belated appreciation of its camp value was no consolation to Dunaway, who for decades refused to discuss Mommie Dearest.
And yet how can you not love it. Disjointed, yes, unhinged, obviously. But its set pieces have an emotional truth that Pauline Kael of The New Yorker, almost alone amongst respected critics, recognised when she wrote that one may laugh at the film, but one could not laugh at the performance.
Behold Dunaway as the widow Crawford sitting at the end of an enormous board table, sporting a fur hat like the one Thatcher wore in Moscow, confronting the board of PepsiCo who want to retire her after the death of her husband, the former CEO of the company.
She begins quietly, her head slowly moving side to side, like a cobra ready to strike at the futility of their aim to “sweep the poor little widow under the carpet”. As they persevere, her eyes blaze with rage. She builds to an explosive scream of “Don’t f**k with me fellas”, before the suits convene in panic and order is restored. Joan gets her way. Again.
The documentary seems to suggest an interesting theory about the whole thing – that it was all a little too close to home. Like the legend of cinema that she portrayed, Dunaway (83) herself had “an eye and a temperament for detail that tips the balance into difficult”.
Like Crawford she too adopted a child “after it was too late for me to have one in a biological way”, and while Liam Dunaway O’Neill does not testify to abuse, he does describe helping his mother get treatment for mental health issues; she was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder. And like Crawford she was, this film reveals, an alcoholic. It’s incredible to see the actress who played little Christina, Mara Hobel, all grown up now and in tears again, this time at Dunaway’s disdain for the film.
And to learn that the actress who played Crawford’s long- suffering maid Carol Ann, Rutanya Alda, had been afraid of Dunaway during the shoot and was constantly in fear of getting fired. “Maybe sometimes I have been unkind to people or cruel,” Dunaway tells the camera. “I don’t want to be, but I am led by extremes of nature.”
Those extremes were perhaps forged in childhood and they would become the engine of Dunaway’s character and her extraordinary performances. An army brat, who weathered her alcoholic father and her parents’ divorce, she became a beauty queen in her teens and a Broadway star in her 20s.
Even after she entered the Oscar-winner stratosphere, she had “mood swings” which went “up and down” and “became more evident later in life”.
The strength of this extraordinary documentary is that, besides recounting an extraordinary career, it has its living, scintillatingly intelligent subject in front of the camera, too late in life to conceal her diva-like imperiousness or her tremulous vulnerability, and never making excuses.
And there is a satisfying Mommie Dearest postscript when Dunaway, asked of her regrets, says: “I would take Crawford back, but I won’t... because I liked her so much.”