L-R Mildred Pierce cast members Evan Rachel Wood, director Todd Haynes and cast member Guy Pearce are joined by fellow cast member Kate Winslet via satellite

By: Valerie Milano (Hollywood Today) 3/25/11

HBO presents the 5-part mini-series this month, “Mildred Pierce”, a rework of the 1946 film starring Joan Crawford from the James M. Cain novel. This time around, Mildred is played by the sexy and smoky, Kate Winslet, probably the opposite sort of person to work with than Crawford, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress.  Kate’s chemistry between her and Guy Pearce is clear on the screen.

Filmmaker Todd Haynes discussed the story with HT and discussed the 2 struggles going on within, “It’s so compelling and complex in the book, the sort of parallel tracks of exploration that he’s [James M. Cain} looking at. One is the mother-daughter dynamic, and the other is class in America and how in both cases sometimes the most natural thing in the world can turn against itself and create sort of irreconcilable conflict. The mother-daughter relationship is one where the mother wants to always maintain closeness to her daughter, and the daughter needs to differentiate herself and individuate and separate, and so these are two absolutely polar opposite urges that get played out in many different ways, in many different homes, but they’re always there to some degree, and it’s conflict built into the most natural relationship in the world that really has no simple resolution. Similarly, I think he describes the sort of yearning of the American middle class toward the aspirations of mobility and ascension in similar ways and talks about them both as the most natural thing in the world, that you want everything for your kids that you didn’t have, but that that very desire can pollute and corrupt the good, you know, basic American pluckiness and resourcefulness and down-to-earthness that we like to pride ourselves with and result in aspirations of wealth and high culture.”

This somewhat dark, melodramatic story is set during the Depression, 1931, middle class Glendale, and opens with Mildred Pierce tossing out her cheating husband, Bert and opting to raise 2 daughters by herself. This is a time when single mothers were not the norm; feminism still a few years off in the future. Mildred struggles to support her family by keeping a business afloat during one of America’s most difficult eras, only to be emotionally tortured and manipulated by her daughter, Veda. The relationships are intense and complicated and often, a bit twisted, and often hard to sit through for so many hours.

Veda, (Evan Rachel Wood) is a self-absorbed and very difficult person whom her mother is so in love with, she can barely see the intense flaws. Winslet explained to TV critics via satellite, “I think one of the things that really fascinated me the most when I read the script was this unbelievably intense relationship between Mildred and Veda, which is based on just pure love and adoration for this child. But yes, it does, I think, teeter on the brink of obsession, absolutely without question. “ Being a mother herself, she seems quite in touch with her character’s feelings, “And every mother-daughter relationship is complex and complicated for its own different set of reasons, but this one was just something else because Mildred was in a position constantly where she didn’t know whether to love her or kill her, and it was almost as though the amount that she did love her was suffocating her all the more all the time.

“I think Mildred’s need for approval is something that I think every mother does feel from their child, whether it’s a daughter or a son actually. And with Veda being this determined, defiant creature, that was so out of Mildred’s grasp and the admiration that Mildred has for her and also the desire that Mildred, you know, could maybe have been that person, as well. I think that in Veda, Mildred saw her own disappointments. Like little pieces of Mildred kept dying every time she saw how brilliant and wonderful and rich Veda was and how much more extraordinary her life could become, and all she could do was love it, encourage it, support it, and want to be a part of it so, so desperately.”

Woods explained how easy it would have been to play Veda as a bratty, hateful daughter “but I think there’s so many different levels to her, and she’s so complex and there’s a reason, and she’s too smart for her own good and too manipulative, and she sees the flaws and her mother’s weaknesses, and she knows how to prey upon them. It teeters on that line of, “Can you love your child too much?” If you love them too much, do you smother them and is it for selfish reasons? Like are you loving them because you’re trying to live vicariously through them, and therefore, they lose themselves? They don’t know who they are anymore, and then they feel like nothing is ever going to be good enough for you. So I think that’s when she turns into “I’m just going to use this and have my own way”.

Guy Pearce plays Mildred’s love interest Monty and explained his character: “It was delightful playing Monty. He’s somebody who really is pleasure-seeking.  He’s had everything pretty much that he’s ever wanted in life. Financially he’s never struggled. And I think having been brought up in a particular world which is obviously very different to what Mildred has experienced, he just doesn’t struggle with the same things that Mildred does.”

The saga continues for 6 hours, (The first 2 hours begins tomorrow March 27^th), as Mildred opens a restaurant in order to support her family in the style to which daughter Veda wants to be a part. Mildred works while Veda spends lavishly and although she is living vicariously through her daughter, she must eventually get Veda out of her house, another devastating development in their relationship. Veda somehow quickly becomes a successful coloratura soprano and heads for New York, but her final betrayal is a shocker.

“I think that for us, certainly as actors, the priority was really just to capture the sort of the horrible honesty that does appear at certain moments in this story. They’re very real people experiencing very real emotions. And the most important thing for us, in terms of the ones who were conveying this story, was to simply be as pure and as honest as possible and as true to the book as possible as well, because it is such a spectacular piece of writing.”