Mommie Dearest: Trash, Treasure, or Something Else?
A Movie Too Wild, Too Weird, and Too Brilliant to Forget
Difficult To Define
Its rare to find a film that ticks so many boxes for so many different groups of people, is both loved and hated, adored and mocked simultaneously, and continues to leave enduring impressions years after its release.
Mommie Dearest is all of those things. It’s one of those rare movies whose meaning depends entirely on who is watching it.
I myself only saw Mommie Dearest for the first time years ago because an old ex-girlfriend practically demanded I sit down and watch what she called a “bat-shit crazy” movie.
She wasn’t wrong.
Mommie Dearest came to the screen as an adaptation of Christina Crawford’s 1978 memoir of the same name. The original vision was likely to capture the tone of the book: an exposé, a deeper look at what it meant to live life within a Hollywood family, and a reminder that cruelty and abuse can exist anywhere.
But that isn’t exactly what you get. Or at least, it isn’t the only effect it ends up having.
A Cinematic Anomoly
One of the single most important factors driving this movie is the performance of Faye Dunaway as the famed actress Joan Crawford.
Her portrayal is nearly impossible to categorize. At times, her acting comes across as shocking. It’s like trying to decide if a tornado is impressive or terrifying. Her intensity and commitment to the role border on dangerous. It isn’t subtle, but it isn’t stupid either. You can’t dismiss it, yet it’s hard to tell if you’re watching a masterclass in acting or a runaway train.
That strange push and pull is what gives the film its lingering appeal. You really can’t pin it down. It’s a little bit of everything wrapped into one movie.
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The film itself has a strange, almost surreal quality…something Kubrick-adjacent, with meticulous framing, moments of high tension, and a general uncanny feeling. At times it feels way too real, personal, and psychological to be a straightforward biopic. Sometimes it slips into outright horror. The mansion feels sterile. The behaviors are obsessive, manic, explosive. Long, tense establishing shots linger, feeling overdone. Then the next scene swings into drama, or unintentional comedy. If you had to diagnose the film, it would probably have bipolar disorder.
Interestingly, the film has the same effects off-screen. When it was released, critics torched it. Many reviewers called it a career misstep for Dunaway, a gross exaggeration of Crawford’s life, and a cinematic disaster. The reaction was so harsh it nearly derailed Dunaway’s acting career.
What’s wilder is that the very elements that critics condemned are the ones that audiences came to love. The extremes, odd stylistic choices, and sheer audacity that earned its poor reputation critically ultimately cemented it as a cult classic. It’s one of those rare movies where the “pros” and “cons” are literally the same, depending on who you ask.
Hated And Loved
Not everyone considers Mommie Dearest cinematic garbage. Over time, it has found a special place in LGBT culture. The over-the-top melodrama, Dunaway’s explosive intensity, and Crawford’s theatricality turned the film into a camp masterpiece. It’s frequently quoted in drag performances, routinely shown in theaters, and celebrated for its excesses.
I’ll stay as spoiler-free as possible, but even without giving anything away, certain scenes have reached near-mythic status…moments so over-the-top that they’ve become endlessly quotable and impossible to forget.
I won’t tell you which ones. Go watch it. You’ll know.
So what’s the biggest takeaway from Mommie Dearest? The whole thing is one great big contradiction:
Mommie Dearest is bad.
Mommie Dearest is iconic.
Mommie Dearest is camp.
Mommie Dearest is brilliant.
Mommie Dearest is misunderstood.
Mommie Dearest is a lot of things, often all at once.
That inability to fit into one box is precisely why it continues to survive. Its refusal to be anything specific is what gives it its allure. It’s a classic. Cult, camp, or accidental masterpiece. You get to decide.
