5 Movies About F*cked Up Mother/Daughter Relationships

“Mommie Dearest” (1981)
Estranged, even abusive mother daughter relationships aren’t entirely new to Hollywood as evinced by this list and several many other cinematic examples (here’s five horrible movie mothers we’ve covered in the past and another five to boot), but one of the most memorable and borderline Grand Guignol is “Mommie Dearest,” Frank Perry‘s 1981 drama about actress Joan Crawford and her daughter Christina (even if it’s ultimately not that successful). Based on Christina Crawford’s scandalous 1978 autobiography of the same name—one of the more infamous Hollywood tell-alls to bring plenty of juicy dirt — the film stars Faye Dunaway as Crawford and Mara Hobel and Diana Scarwid as the younger and older versions of Christina respectively. Adopted by Crawford at a young age, the film (like the exposé) alleges that the diva movie star was a shamelessly publicity-hungry, domineering, hyper-controlling and physically abusive mother that took in the child for selfish matters of loneliness (and suggests perhaps she did it to get press too). The notorious “wire hanger” scene—wherein Joan beats her daughter for having the audacity to hang expensive clothes on cheap wire hangers—is both genuinely disturbing and comical (though obviously it isn’t meant to be funny). There’s a lot of histrionics—“Don’t fuck with me, fellas!” being a rather for-the-ages ridiculous line—and it doesn’t always work, but Dunaway does play a convincing and rather insecure and troubled movie star whose vanity and need for attention is a poisonous by-product of her industry.

The young Crawford (and her brother Christopher) were famously left out of Joan’s will “for reasons which are well known to them,” and it’s been speculated by several industry pundits, this act of parental rejection from the grave was what inspired Christina’s book and not actual abuse. But even 30 years later the surviving Crawford contends that it’s all true. “I can’t tell you how many times I have been told in person and with letters that reading the book made people realize for the first time that they weren’t alone,” she said in a 2013 interview.

Perhaps falling short of the macabre horror-melodrama that Robert Aldrich perfected with the beautifully twisted twofer of “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” (1962) and “Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte,” (Perry just isn’t an auteur of that rank unfortunately, though he was nominated for Best Director in 1962 for the already forgotten “David And Lisa”), it does come close thanks to Dunaway’s operatic go-for-broke performance. Perhaps because it was meant to be a drama, it doesn’t go for the Aldrich grotesquerie of aging stars that we love so much, but we really wish DP Paul Lohmann would have actually lit the picture with even a slight ghoulish edge instead of its almost TV-flatness. And therein perhaps the fatal flaw of “Mommie Dearest,” it is melodramatic, shrill and over-the-top, but it has no real flair for camp or sense of sly humor. It takes itself deadly seriously (which often makes it unintentionally funny) and just isn’t very artful. Critics panned it at the time (Roger Ebert said in his review, “I can’t imagine who would want to subject themselves to this movie”) and “Mommie Dearest” has become a cult classic, but aside from “Thirteen” it’s easily the weakest film on this list (amusingly enough Paramount switched gears in the marketing and embraced irony when they discovered audiences taking to its unintentionally funny moments). Still there are delights in the performance just for its sheer scene-chewing and as far as delicious depictions of monstrous, but vulnerable mothers, you could do a hell of a lot worse than Dunaway as Joan Crawford. Christina’s own final word? “It’s not a very good movie.”

“Postcards from the Edge” (1990)
Mike Nichols’ adaptation of Carrie Fisher’s screenplay (based on her book of the same name, which was in turn loosely inspired by her own life with her famous mother, Debbie Reynolds) is a film that feels like it’s fallen somewhat out of fashion, but is probably ripe for rediscovery. Directed with typical comedic nuance and sympathy by Nichols, it’s also a sterling showcase for its performers, of course, with Meryl Streep gaining an Oscar nomination, but Shirley MacLaine maybe even stealing the show, at least according to our recent rewatch. They play daughter-and-mother Suzanne Vale and Doris Mann, both actresses, with Vale (Streep) only really hitting her career stride, while Mann is a bona fide old-school star, with all the attendant publicity, wealth and tribute drag acts that come with it. The contradictory nature of their relationship is heightened by the fact that they both are of the same profession, and that that profession is one that itself fosters an unusually high degree of drama and volatility in its practitioners (you can’t imagine quite the same conflicting currents of jealousy, vanity and ageism flowing through, say, a film about mother-and-daughter dental hygienists). But the film is also remarkable for the real warmth that exists between the women, even though their relationship is fractured and can be fractious: Suzanne’s joy at her mother’s showboating performance at the unasked-for post-rehab party Doris throws her is as genuine as her age-old anger at how Doris lifted her skirt to flash the attendees at Suzanne’s 17th birthday (“IT TWIRLED UP!” snarls her mother). And ultimately, it’s a hopeful film, in which admissions in hospital rooms can lead to rapprochement and forgiveness and each can learn, despite tangled histories to appreciate the other for the magnificent mess-ups they both are.

The film begins as Suzanne fluffs a word (tellingly, she says “Mummy” instead of “money”) during a long take shot of a movie she’s working on for director Lowell Kolcheck (Gene Hackman), after which Kolchek discovers she’s on drugs. Later overdosing during a one-night stand with Jack Faulkner (Dennis Quaid), Suzanne is admitted to rehab by her mother Doris, where she (without too much difficulty, it must be said) gets clean and tries to go back to work, only to be told that she’s uninsurable unless living with a responsible parent, i.e. her mother. We can forgive the film it’s rather glossed-over take on addiction and recovery because it’s really not the central focus, instead the story’s main fascination is with the love-and-loathing tussle that exists between the two women—at no point is it suggested that either has been a monster to the other (contrasted with, say “Mommie Dearest” which gets a shout-out), but neither is either one totally blameless. And so the story actually works quite evenhandedly, delivering in the end less an overcoming-obstacles-to-find-success narrative than a satisfyingly balanced, and still inside baseball-funny, tale of the older generation learning the grace to pass the baton, and the younger generation learning how to accept it gracefully.

In addition to “Coraline,” “Precious” and of course the first “Carrie” which we’ve written about in roughly this context previously (those links again are here and here), “Mildred Pierce” is another film we adore which takes as its central theme a completely borked mother/daughter bond, and which, in having Joan Crawford portray the heroically self-sacrificing and infinitely loving mother, provides a nice counterpoint to “Mommie Dearest,” above (and the Todd Haynes miniseries is pretty fantastic too). “White Oleander” is another female-ensemble-led drama of a hard mother spawning troubled offspring, while the horror genre has also provided a few entries, with “Mama” and “Orphan” being some of the more recent examples. Aside from that there are many, many films in which a fucked-up maternal relationship with a daughter forms a subplot, but two we found particularly memorable were “Wild at Heart” which scores extra points for featuring real-life mother and daughter Diane Ladd and Laura Dern, and Hitchcock‘s misogynist, mother-hating marvel “Marnie.” With the sole caution that we did try to focus on films in which both mother and daughter a full characters (as opposed to the daughter being a baby or small child, for example) feel free to get all Electra complex on us and shout out your favorites of the ones we’ve missed below.  – with contributions by Rodrigo Perez