At the start of the fall TV season, HBO gave us the best new series of the year with Boardwalk Empire, which was set in the Prohibition era in Atlantic City, N.J. This Sunday, HBO launches an ambitious, impressive five-hour miniseries — and as with Boardwalk Empire, it’s set during the Depression.
But this one, called Mildred Pierce, is more intimate and, in the end, more emotional and more haunting. It’s based on the 1941 novel by James M. Cain, about a middle-class woman trying to survive — and feed and nurture her young daughters — during very tough times. In 1945, it was one of three Cain stories made into a hit Hollywood movie in as many years — after Double Indemnity, and before The Postman Always Rings Twice. And the title role of Mildred Pierce won Joan Crawford an Oscar.
This new HBO version hands the title role to Kate Winslet, who does wonders with it. It’s directed by Todd Haynes, who wrote the screenplay adaptation with Jon Raymond, and they put almost all the drama’s weight on the shoulders of their leading lady. Todd Haynes also directed I’m Not There — that brilliant fable of a movie in which different actors and actresses play Bob Dylan at various times in his life — but for Mildred Pierce, it’s all about keeping it real. Astoundingly real, down to the period magazines and wallpaper, the food on the diner plates and the slightly muted photography.
Remaking the story of Mildred Pierce, at this point in this decade, is particularly shrewd. As the drama opens — in Glendale, California, in 1931 — Mildred’s marriage to her husband Bert breaks up suddenly. It leaves her, in the early years of the Depression, with two young daughters, no prospects for work and no idea how to keep going.
It’s easy to relate that sort of anxiety to today’s financial meltdown — and even easier because Kate Winslet, early on, vanishes completely into the role of Mildred. She’s determined to provide for her daughters, but a visit to an employment agency generates nothing, except a lecture about how she isn’t qualified to do anything but cook or clean — and, during hard times, there are plenty of people willing to do that. But when Mildred is asked out for a date by a predatory friend of her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s, her neighbor has some more practical advice. And the neighbor is played by Melissa Leo, who follows up her Oscar-winning role in The Fighter with another winning performance here.