A Mother’s Love, Unrequited (Published 2011) (2024)

Fidelity may be a buttress of marriage, but it is sometimes a burden on film adaptations.

And “Mildred Pierce,” a beautifully made mini-series that begins Sunday on HBO and stars Kate Winslet, proves the point. It’s a five-part drama that is loyally, unwaveringly true to James M. Cain’s 1941 novel and somehow not nearly as satisfying as the 1945 film noir that took shameless liberties with plot, characters and settings.

The Hollywood version compressed the Depression-era drama into a soapy 1940s murder mystery. “Mildred Pierce” wasn’t by any means the best work of the director Michael Curtiz, who had previously made “Casablanca,” even though William Faulkner was one of the screenwriters, and its star, Joan Crawford, won an Oscar by playing against type as a loving mother. Yet the movie has had lasting cult appeal, and it’s not just because of all those milky close-ups of its star in varying states of maternal distress.

The tale gives fresh expression to an age-old primal fear: a mother’s dread of being supplanted or destroyed by a daughter. Mildred’s tortured relationship with her spoiled daughter, Veda, is an even darker variation on the classic younger woman/older woman rivalries that fueled “All About Eve,” “Bonjour Tristesse” and even “The Bad Seed.”

The filmmaker Todd Haynes, who directed the 2002 movie “Far From Heaven” as a homage to the 1950s Technicolor melodramas of Douglas Sirk, here pays opulent tribute to the written word. Yet his painstaking effort to restore every brushstroke of the author’s original story paints over the ambiguities of class and social ambition that play out within the Pierce family dynamic.

Mildred Pierce is a housewife in Glendale, Calif., whose life is turned upside down in the Great Depression. Her husband, a failed real estate developer, walks out, leaving Mildred a grass widow with no income besides the money she makes baking pies for neighbors. Almost every scene and snatch of dialogue is taken from the book, including the deliciously pretentious airs of young Veda, who as a child is played by Morgan Turner and says things like “One might think peasants had taken over the house.”

Other characters speak in 1930s slang, getting “stinko” on bootlegger gin or behaving like “saps.”

The music and the rich cinematography also do justice to the era, and exacting attention is paid to the smallest period details, from the thick, mottled window panes in a Spanish-style bungalow to the square stop signs on two-lane roads to the beach.

Both Ms. Winslet and Evan Rachel Wood, who plays Veda as a teenager, have full-frontal nude scenes. They are “tasteful,” as the saying goes, but seem designed less to advance the story than to prove, once again, the filmmakers’ dedication to historical accuracy — in even the more remote areas of feminine grooming.

Ms. Winslet is an amazing actress who transparently conveys the heroine’s smallest nuance of feeling, be it shame, irritation, motherly love, anger, sorrow and, once she meets her dashing upper-class lover, Monty (Guy Pearce), lust. But the writers buried the character flaws and class limitations that made Mildred Pierce such a distinctive and modern heroine.

Cain created a woman of modest roots who becomes obsessed with giving her beautiful, snobbish daughter a better life and discovers a knack for business: Mildred is not long a victim and she isn’t always sympathetic. As the author put it, “Into her eyes, if she were provoked, or made fun of, or puzzled, there came a squint that was anything but alluring, that betrayed a rather appalling literal-mindedness, or matter-of-factness, or whatever it might be called, but that hinted nevertheless, at something more than complete vacuity inside.”

The costumes are cut to the fashion of the times, and while that authenticity helps evoke the era of breadlines and speakeasies, it doesn’t do Ms. Winslet any favors. The drab brown print dresses and dowdy necklines make her look dumpier than nature or the part demand. In the book Mildred is only commonly pretty but has unstinting sexual allure. This Mildred looks matronly and well bred, and that miscue is compounded by her genteel speaking tone. Ms. Winslet is affecting in the role of a gutsy, long-suffering single mother, but at times she seems more like Mrs. Miniver than Mildred Pierce.

Ms. Wood is quite entertaining and over the top as a narcissist with a somewhat monstrous gift for deception and cruelty, but the mother-daughter competition would be more compelling if the women’s moral failings were just a little more evenly matched.

The pace is luxuriant and sometimes slow, taking a long time to wind up to its gothic, almost campy denouement, but that doesn’t mean that the detours are not enjoyable. Mildred is surrounded by weak men and fiercely supportive women, and Mare Winningham as Ida, a gruff waitress turned business partner, is particularly appealing. Mr. Pearce, who recently played Edward VIII in “The King’s Speech,” is good in everything and manages to be shiftily appealing as Monty, the polo-playing Pasadena gigolo.

HBO’s “Mildred Pierce” works best as a feminist soap opera — the story of an abandoned woman who sacrifices her pride and everything else for her child, and is checkmated by the object of all that love and ambition. But the mini-series doesn’t make the most of the mythic clash of mother, lover and ungrateful child.

Mildred Pierce

HBO, Sunday night at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.

Directed and written by Todd Haynes;Jon Raymond, co-writer; Christine Vachon, Pamela Koffler, John Wells and Mr. Haynes, executive producers; Ilene S. Landress, co-executive producer. Presented by HBO in association with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Produced by Killer Films/John Wells Productions.

WITH: Kate Winslet (Mildred Pierce), Guy Pearce (Monty Beragon), Evan Rachel Wood (Veda Pierce), Melissa Leo (Lucy Gessler), James LeGros (WallyBurgan), Brian F. O’Byrne (Bert Pierce).