You'll hate this movie if you watch it as a serious drama. Watch it as a comedy, and you'll see why i love this movie.Faye Dunaway in her greatest comedic performance ever!

'Mommie Dearest' is a memoir by Joan Crawford's adoptive daughter, Christina. Apparently behind closed doors, Joan was an absolute nutcase. I am not sure how much of it is real, fake or embellished, but this film adaptation is a definite embellishment.This is by no means an easy film to sit through. It is full of rage, screaming, crying, and torment. Oddly enough, the physical stuff does not happen as much as you'd think. 'Mommie Dearest' is nothing compared to other insane films released this day in age, but this still has its moments that are difficult to sit through. Child abuse will always be a tough pill to swallow, but over-the-top cheesy acting makes this even harder. Often, movies about child abuse are well done. Not here.Faye Dunaway certainly gained notoriety as the late silver screen actress. Some say she was excellent, others say she was unintentionally funny. I am part of the latter. The problem with her portrayal is that she plays Crawford like someone on Saturday Night Live would play her. Joan Crawford in 'Mildred Pierce' was Joan Crawford playing Mildred Pierce. This movie treats Crawford as is her characters in the movies was how she was in real life. Then there's some bits where Dunaway plays Crawford like other actresses at the time. A few times I expected Dunaway to say "Mr. DeMille, I am ready for my closeup."So the movie starts with Joan Crawford's celebrity status on the rise and her wanting to have children. She cannot, so she adopts. The first she adopts is Christina. Surrounding her with money and glam, the only price to pay was her adoptive mother's wrath. Joan is a hard-ass under pressure to be Hollywood's top star. She also does not want her children to be spoiled brats. But Joan definitely crosses the line. The abuse happens sporadically, maybe two or three scenes' worth. But when it does it stays in your mind, completely clouding everything that happens afterwards. The abuse seems like a lot, but actually is not. The biggest stomach-turner is when Christina is just a little girl and Joan finds a wire hanger. Joan goes completely berserk and beats her with it before making a mess in the washroom and making her clean it. The next stomach-turner happens awhile later with Christina as a young woman. A brief interaction gets escalated into Joan choking Christina. An interview with the real Christina says that if the people didn't intervene, she would be dead. The performances by Joan and Christina are pretty bad, but get saved by the last act. After the near-fatal choke scene, Faye begins to play Joan Crawford like Joan Crawford. She plays her like a real person and not a Saturday night Live character. I liked that. The girl that plays Christina simply did a better job just because. it's weird considering how bad she was in the choking scene. While they may do better jobs in their portrayals, the script really lazes out. The one thing that was needed was more explanations of "why?" Joan realizes how awful she has been and the bond between the two grows. Despite the abuse, Joan and Christina have always loved each other. And we are expected to believe that? When Joan goes bat-****-crazy over the metal hangers, why is she flipping out that badly? I get that we are not supposed to sympathize greatly with Joan, but giving any form of insight on the reasons of these wacky situations would have really increased the overall value of the film. As for Christina, she's just there. Getting an insight on the victim would have increased the overall value too. Even when the two of them start to perform better, none of the quintessential questions are ever answered. Not sure how much is real or not, but the final verdict of the movie is an uneven laze. The acting is bad (except the last 20 minutes or so) and the writing is awful. Just skip this and watch Joan Crawford's real films.

I feel like this movie doesn't go into enough depth and focuses more on Joan's life than Christina's when it was based on a book by Christina and her own life with her adoptive mother. I'd also like to say that Joan really gets a bad rep for this side of her but she obviously had some very serious mental issues and whatnot and deserves a little slack; also I feel that it's very obvious that a large part of the story is missing that wouldn't paint Christina as such a helpless angel.I still enjoyed watching the film and will definitely watch it again, I did not care for the direction of the film (skipping around a lot- no natural transitions) but the costumes and sets were pleasing to the eye.

One tip-off to the badness of this picture is the eyebrows. They dominate every scene in which they appear. You can't take your eyes off them - they're frickin' weird, idiotic, laughable.The eyebrows provide insight into the thinking of the director and writers of this picture. They saw this project as an exercise in camp; they totally focus on Joan's off-the-charts weirdness. J.C. was obviously weird, but the creators could have made a much more interesting picture by offering a nuanced portrayal.For the record, Joan Crawford's eyebrows were not invariaby laughable and she was not always wacky. She was extraordinary. She was alive. She was more alive than 99 percent of the women of her generation. She was a handful, to use an outmoded phrase - much too interesting and vital for the hacks who wrote and directed this film.The creators could have paid more attention to Joan's courage in defying the pigs who ran Hollywood. These pigs tried to tell her what to do; she told them to go screw themselves. I'd say "Bravo!" to that but the word "bravo" apparently never occurred to Frank Perry, Frank Yablans, and their gang of idiots. The film's creators could have done interesting things with the failure of mainstream doctors to help Joan through hormonal craziness. (She had big-time hormones, no doubt about it; mainstream medicine in the 1940s and '50s had no clue how to deal with big-time female hormones; this fact remains mostly true to this day. Alternative medicine does a much better job; unfortunately for Joan, alternative medicine barely existed in her heyday.)The film's creators opted instead for wacky eyebrows and weirdness. They made a joke of Joan Crawford. The impulse to make a joke of things was common in Hollywood in the '70s and early '80s when this film was made. See, for instance, what happened to the James Bond franchise via the oh-so-funny Roger Moore and what Dino De Laurentiis did to King Kong. Some of this impulse can be tracked to the "Batman" revival circa 1966.All of that said, "Mommie Dearest" is fascinating if you're obsessed with show biz and can't get enough of the backstory, no matter how wackily it's presented. (I'm right there with ya.) I like the glimpses of 1930s Hollywood homes. I like many of the performances.Someone should write a decent book about how the entertainment business is portrayed in movies and on TV, examining this film, "Entourage," "Sunset Boulevard," "Tootsie," "Coal Miner's Daughter," "A Star Is Born," "Gods and Monsters," "In a Lonely Place," "Barton Fink," etc.