The five-part mini-series Mildred Pierce started Sunday on HBO, with the first two episodes airing back-to-back. The first episode and its star Kate Winslet start off quietly, but the tension and drama builds steadily. Winslet is strong and surprising as Mildred, a woman with a core of iron that surprises everyone around her, sometimes including herself. She also has a blind spot — devotion to her older daughter Veda. She is in an unfulfilling marriage and it is clear that she is pouring all her unresolved hopes and dreams into her older daughter, as younger daughter Ray is too young and possibly too much like her father to gain her focus.
Mildred's philandering husband Bert, played by Brían F. O'Byrne, takes off, and she is left to support herself and their two daughters. Lucy, (Melissa Leo) a friendly neighbor with some not-so-savory advice, suggests she might start marketing herself as a kept woman. When Wally (James LeGros), a business associate of her husband's, offers to take her out Lucy tells her to not let him buy her dinner but to cook for him and sleep with him, so that he owes her. Mildred does just that. Hard reality and Mildred's response to it were glossed over in the 1945 film noir Joan Crawford version. This telling of the story, apart from the basic plot structure, is so different in every way that if I had ever intended to compare the two versions, that idea would have pretty much disappeared by the end of the first scene.
Director and co-writer Todd Haynes is always good at period (Far from Heaven). The colors in Mildred Pierce — muted pinks and greens and browns and yellows — can't hide all the passion and frustration below the surface. Winslet is wonderful as the grass widow (a woman with an absent husband) who at first can't imagine becoming a waitress to support her daughters because she knows that they (read Veda) will be ashamed of her.
But as a woman in an employment office trying to help her get a job tells her, "Get over it." It's 1931, the Great Depression. There are no jobs anywhere, but she refuses to take a job as housekeeper to a rich woman, who in their brief interview familiarly calls her Mildred when she insists on being addressed as "Mrs. Pierce."
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