#28
Post
by colinr0380 » Tue Jan 02, 2018 6:19 am
It might be pushing it too far, but I was struck on watching the film this time through that this could be seen as a good companion piece to Citizen Kane, maybe even the female led take on a similar structured journey! We see the title character capitalise on their opportunities and set up a successful business, only to have that success impact on their private lives as their love affairs collapse around them, seen mostly through flashback.
It even makes the dying man’s final word in the opening murder, returned to at the end of the film (and becoming inexplicable in its eventual context), make sense, as his croaked out “Mildred!” is this film’s equivalent of “Rosebud”!
The main differences are in scale (the newspaper empire versus a successful restaurant chain) and the distanced, unemotional nature of the investigation into Kane’s empire (the reporter’s investigation in Kane being comparable more perhaps to the insurance investigator in The Killers!) compared to the more crime of passion noir murder-mystery structure in Mildred Pierce. There is also the way that in Citizen Kane the actions of the absent title character are being explained by all of the supporting cast of his life, in the process of mythologising and/or demonising this larger than life character, which provides some insight but (ironically for a newspaper magnate) filtered through a fragmentary secondhand, potentially biased perspective. Whilst in Mildred Pierce, after a couple of supporting characters are interviewed by the police in connection with the murdered man in the beachhouse, the bulk of the narrative involves Mildred’s flashback as she unburdens herself of her life story to the investigators. Albeit keeping a couple of key points to herself at the very end! But unlike Kane, she will not be allowed to keep them a secret for long!
In some ways the interrogation and the film itself is a chance for Mildred to finally tell her own story and have people listen to her, after having been betrayed by lovers with wandering eyes and daughters with expensive tastes. Maybe that’s what makes this a more emotional 'women’s picture' than a man’s? Kane never gets to manufacture his own life story, and takes his secrets of his interior life to the grave. Kane is more of a collector of artefacts and builder of ostentatious Xanadus to compensate for his lack of love, whilst Mildred’s empire really is in the end all about providing for her daughter (even eventually the lover!), and when the ungrateful child for whom all of this was done has been banished Mildred herself has no particular drive to continue amassing wealth and property, or even to carry on running her business any more (as rohmerin says above, "Veda" really is Mildred's entire life, maybe fatefully made more so by being the only surviving daughter). And Mildred’s greatest catharsis comes from finally having the yoke of burden that her daughter represents legitimised and removed by the authorities rather than having to cut the ties that bind herself.
Arguably a slight flaw of the end of Mildred Pierce are perhaps the final moments, which sees Mildred in back in the arms of the first husband again as they leave the police station (and incarcerated daughter!) into the morning sunlight. Yet that was the husband who was stifling Mildred with domesticity in the early scenes and not too supportive of her business ambitions and making her own money for the toll it was taking on the housework, so is it entirely happy that Mildred has ended up back with this dull lunk? Even if he’s not going to dip his hand into the till or seduce the daughter like the others what does he have to offer Mildred, aside from just being proven right about the daughter’s gold-digging ways? (Are we meant to believe that he knew that Mildred's ambition was purely about her daughter, and not to have any success or autonomy of her own, and the implication of the ending is that now the daughter has gone and Mildred has gotten her ambition out of her system that she will be fine going back to 'just being a normal housewife'? Is that the happy ending? Of being free of drives and having made peace with the home abandoned at the beginning?) Either way, I think that I would have much preferred to see Mildred kick him to the kerb as well and go off with the more than capable business partner Kay! (Kay of course being the most able character in the film, with all of the correct assessments of other characters as well as the best lines! Kind of the equivalent to the Joseph Cotten character from Kane!)