KEITH UHLICH
Mommie Dearest
film classics
Mommie Dearest (1981, Frank Perry, United States) A classic of the campiest sort, this biopic about actress Joan Crawford and her tempestuous relationship with her daughter Christina is a prime showcase for one Ms. Faye Dunaway. Her face made up with Joan’s smooth-skinned sheen and boldly drawn-on eyebrows, she resembles, as some critics noted at the time of the film’s release, a Noh-mask version of the icon we all know. There isn’t a single piece of scenery that Dunaway doesn’t devour, regurgitate, and wolf down again. Favorite moments are ample: the “wire hangers” aria; the Pepsi board meeting outburst; endlessly quotable lines such as “Tina…bring me the axe!” and “I’m not mad at you, I’m mad at the dirt!” Mommie Dearest is a laugh riot that, in its own weird way, gets profoundly at the sense of terror a parent can instill in a child, how even the most ridiculous outbursts can still leave deep and festering wounds. Even if unintended, this is one of the great movies about making a cackleworthy spectacle of your own trauma. (Streaming on Max.)
The Passenger (1975, Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy/France/Spain) The great Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni teamed up with American superstar Jack Nicholson for this mesmerizing treatise on the malleability of self. Nicholson plays journalist David Locke, whose disaffection leads him to assume the life of a mysteriously deceased businessman. As he embarks on this new existence, Locke becomes caught up in a plot that includes arms dealing, hitmen, and a mysterious woman (Maria Schneider) who becomes his companion. But this being an Antonioni film, the emphasis is less on story than on bodies moving through space, often with a purposelessness that the director, with his impeccable aural and visual rigor, manages to make poetic and profound. It’s an existentially fraught journey that culminates in one of the greatest climactic shots in cinema history, as a person obliquely becomes a corpse, effaced of any need for identification or, indeed, of being. (Streaming on MUBI.) C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E
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