Mildred Pierce

Where to begin appreciating this great work? The acting alone is enough to merit a separate column. Kate Winslet’s performance in the title role is terrific — intelligent, focused and seemingly devoid of ego. She never indicates, emphasizes, showboats or otherwise tells you how to feel about her character, a divorced single mother who splits from her distracted, cheating husband (Brian F. O’Byrne), takes a grueling job as a waitress, starts selling her delicious homemade pies on the side, works her way into the restaurant business, has a torrid and troubled affair with a penniless former playboy named Monte Beragon (Guy Pearce) and struggles to mother her daughters, master her fate and understand herself. Winslet might be one of the greatest working actresses without evident self-regard. Strong as she is in dialogue scenes, she’s even more effective in silent close-ups, letting conflicting emotions play out on her face as she watches, listens and thinks. O’Byrne and Pearce are equally strong and just as subtle. There are no villains in this series, only deeply flawed people, and you react to them as you might react to valued people in your own life, alternating exasperation with affection.

The series itself is a technical and artistic triumph. Its costumes and set decoration are completely imagined yet unfussy, convincing you that this is not a lavish historical fantasia, but a present-tense world, a real place where human beings live and work.  Carter Burwell’s score is reminiscent of his work in the Coen brothers’ “True Grit” and “A Serious Man” – introspective and sometimes mournful, with a repeated string melody that bears the story along like a gentle yet implacable ocean current. Ed Lachman’s cinematography makes efficiency lyrical, zeroing in on significant details, panning to reveal new spaces and situate characters within them, and using the vertical lines of doorways and window frames to carve screen space into panels; yet it never feels ostentatiously beautiful.  “Mildred Pierce” is the sort of production where spaces and situations aren’t presented but entered into, like rooms in a house. 

My endorsement comes with two caveats. First, this is not a work that shoves plot points or images into viewers’ faces and shouts, “Look at this! It’s moving and powerful and important!” It’s quiet and unhurried, establishing a deliberate rhythm from its first scene and weaving its  spell through a gradual accumulation of detail. HBO is airing the first two installments Sunday, March 27 (9 p.m. Eastern/8 Central), and if you’re planning to watch or record it, I  recommend that you view both episodes back-to-back. The first hour is mostly setup and housekeeping. “Mildred Pierce” doesn’t really start to build and crest until the second hour. But by the end of that chapter it has attained an almost overwhelming force.

Second, don’t go into “Mildred Pierce” with preconceived notions. Haynes’ work here reminded me of a friend’s admonition that some of the greatest artists are ones whose work must be experienced twice: the first time to get over what you thought it was going to be, and the second time to appreciate what it actually is. In that sense, viewers who have never read the James M. Cain source novel or seen the beloved 1945 film version might be the ideal audience, because they’ll watch without mentally cross-checking every event and line. The HBO “Mildred Pierce” has already been described as a faithful adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel, but that’s not quite true. Haynes transcribes many of the book’s scenes almost verbatim, but the tone and intent are different — and there’s a basic, very important change that’s sure to be controversial. The miniseries isn’t a remake of the 1945 film either, or a tribute to it, or even an answer to it. It is its own thing.

And as I watched it — rereading the Cain novel in between chapters — I think I started to get what Haynes saw in the story, and understand where his interests lay. Thanks to the trifecta of “Mildred Pierce,” ”The Postman Always Rings Twice” and “Double Indemnity” – stories steeped in envy, lust and violence — Cain’s name will always be associated with pulp, and once movies got hold of his fiction, people started to see him as a literary progenitor of (or contributor to) film noir. That’s accurate, but only up to a point. Cain’s fiction is passionate and sometimes lurid — noir traits for sure — but it also owes a great deal to social realism. He’s not just concerned with who’s doing what to whom, but with the economic, social and political forces that shape people’s personalities and drive them to desperate acts. (Noir is the drama of class conflict and class resentment, powered by people who have lost social status or never had it, and who contrive violent shortcuts to comfort.)

The HBO ”Mildred Pierce” isn’t noir or pulp or even a thriller or a melodrama. It’s just a drama, period — an extended character portrait of a particular woman in a particular time and place. Mildred is used to being a comfortable (but unhappy) middle-class housewife. Her life revolves around her likable but straying husband and her two daughters; the elder child, Veda (Morgan Turner in early episodes, Evan Rachel Wood in later chapters), never forgives her for instigating the divorce that pushed out the father who spoiled her; she transforms her natural resentment into monstrously bratty and sometimes hateful behavior, to the point where she seems to take pleasure in ruining any happiness that comes Mildred’s way. Haynes treats the book as a portrait of Americans in the transitional 1930s — an era in which Prohibition and the Great Depression gave way to the New Deal and a return of economic hope, and a time of immense social and psychological change for American women. He’s interested in the fabric of everyday reality and his characters’ reactions to it — their struggle to find and keep love, raise kids, pay the bills, improve their lives and perhaps realize their dreams.

The title “Mildred Pierce” is usually thought of as a synonym for melodrama — for guilt, sex and murder — and for Joan Crawford, whose performance in the 1945 movie defined her screen image and won her an Oscar. Haynes’ take is more naturalistic. He’s one of the most acutely film-history-conscious of major American filmmakers, but here, for the first time in his career, he doesn’t seem to be trying to interpret a genre, prove a theorem or juxtapose different modes for effect. He’s just telling the story. If the production recalls any prior work, it’s Terence Davies’ adaptation of “The House of Mirth,” which was about as visually expressive as an adaptation of a period novel could be while remaining earthbound.  As Mildred, Winslet is the anti-Crawford. Where Crawford’s physical presence (simultaneously hyper-feminine and mannish) stylized Mildred and made her into an iconic figure, Winslet’s interpretation is more life-size — like what you might imagine a strong-willed, passionate grandmother or great-grandmother to have been like when you weren’t around to know her.

She is a complex and elusive character, impossible to diminish or summarize. She’s casually voluptuous but awkwardly aware of her body; she knows she’s attractive and takes pride in her attractiveness, but she also hates how it complicates her relationship with men. There’s a terrific moment in the third episode where Mildred takes Monte to task for casually calling her “the best piece of tail I ever had,” and says that she would be happy to take that as a compliment if it weren’t the first thing Monte thought to say about her. In the graphic sex scenes (another major departure from both the book and the 1945 film) Mildred often seems reluctant to let go of herself — and astonished and delighted when she does. In the scenes where Mildred confronts Veda, trying and failing to suppress the girl’s insatiable need to win every argument and dominate every room, you sense her struggling to assert her motherly authority without becoming a monster. When she snaps and slaps her daughter, it’s not a melodramatic gesture, but a tragic lapse of control, a confirmation of helplessness in the face of her overwhelming insecurity and anger. The woman is a mystery to herself. Because she lacks the tools and encouragement to delve into her personality and try to make sense of it, the entire story has an undertow of frustration.

Haynes doesn’t cheat by giving Mildred or any of the other characters a falsely modern, self-aware consciousness. There are no characters meant to stand in for a 21st century, therapeutic mind-set; these people are who they are, and the era is what it is, and you simply have to meet it on its own terms. That’s the real triumph of “Mildred Pierce” — its ability to recognize the truth of what human beings are, and have been, and present that truth without compromise. 

“Midnight in Paris,” “The Tree of Life,” “Super 8,” “The Artist,” “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” “Hugo” and “The War Horse” were all, to some extent, about nostalgia — about wrapping oneself in the texture of some glorious past, be it an earlier period in a character’s own life or an earlier era in filmmaking. Some of the highest-profile TV — successful and unsuccessful — had nostalgia on the brain, wallowing in luxurious sets, costumes, hairstyles, music and slang from the early- and mid-20th century — even as they repeatedly told and showed us that things weren’t so great Back Then, whenever Back Then was. The short list includes the glossy but unsuccessful network series “The Playboy Club” and “Pan Am,” HBO’s “Mildred Pierce” and “Boardwalk Empire,” ReelzChannel’s “The Kennedys,” PBS’ “Downton Abbey” and “Brideshead Revisited” and “The Hours.” That “Midnight in Paris” quote sums then all up rather nicely. Superficially they’re all so different that it seems crazy to group them together — they vary in setting from the very early 20th century to the early ’60s, and their tones are all over the map: dramatic, melodramatic, droll, shticky, tragic, horrific, you name it.

But there’s something basic and significant connecting all of them, and I think the connection is more aesthetic than historical. It is, as Paul said, about the need to escape the present, and not so much about the particular of the past that’s being escaped into. It’s about tactility — a fear that the virtual world is displacing the real one, and a corresponding conviction that a cinematic or televised re-creation of the past — however stylized or “unreal” — can feel somehow more real than whatever we’re living through now.

To borrow a literary analogy, the texts of these productions were often overwhelmed by the illustrations; even as the plotlines showed us how cruel life could be, and how ignorant and venal the characters were, the viewer’s eye still feasted on those dresses! Those hats! Those cars! Those hissing vinyl records spinning on those elegant Victrolas! And of course the white beams of light slicing through cigarette-befogged darkness in movie theaters and casting black-and-white images up on big screens, images shots on honest-to-God film.

Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” and Michel Hazanavicius’s “The Artist” both worshiped, even fetishized silent cinema, or more accurately, the idea of silent cinema, and the era that spawned it: a time of steam engines and big black automobiles and stony-faced men in hats and long coats. Like the boozy, smoky, wood-and-wool-and-brass tableaux of “Mildred Pierce” and “Boardwalk Empire” and ABC’s intriguing if ultimately unsuccessful “Pan Am,” these films were not so much about the historical particulars of a time or place as the re-created, fantasized texture of it. Anything prior to the 1990s could still be considered a remnant of the Industrial or Machine Age, an epoch in which things were physical and present — when they were indisputably and obviously there, and not some incredible digital simulation; when some person, or some machine run by people, made things, and when even popular culture was something you could touch, or that you at least knew you could touch: a book, a film, a record. Until as recently as 10 years ago, even television was shot on tape, and could (in a pinch) be cut on tape, with a razor blade and tape — just like film, or a construction paper collage.

That’s all gone now, or going away soon: This was the year that major camera manufacturers announced that they would no longer make new motion picture film cameras. This same year we learned that the days of film itself were numbered. Some sources claim it will be extinct by 2015. Major distributors just don’t see the point of producing it any longer, now that everything is being shot, edited and shown digitally. Major studios announced that they would begin phasing out rentals of actual film prints, because it was too expensive and bothersome to store, maintain and ship them — and besides, now that everything has been converted to ones and zeroes, what’s the point?

This was also the year that we started to hear very serious rumblings about the end of media as a physical object that one could hold in one’s hand: not just the vinyl records and 35mm film prints that old timers like yours truly love to blather on about, but the supposedly more cold and forbidding late 20th century versions, such as videotapes and CDs and DVDs. Those are on their way out, too, if reports — and the maneuverings of industry giants such as Netflix — are to be believed. It’ll all be virtual soon, an endless stream of data held on gigantic servers in undisclosed locations and “licensed” to us for private use on our computers and mobile devices and perhaps soon in the chips that will be installed on the brain stem of every American newborn, along with the port that allows them to jack into the Matrix.

“All men fear death,” says Ernest Hemingway in “Midnight in Paris.” “It’s a natural fear that consumes us all. We fear death because we feel that we haven’t loved well enough or loved at all, which ultimately are one and the same.” The film’s tone is rather jokey as he says this, but from the intensity in his eyes you can tell he’s not kidding — and if you read the words in plain black-and-white, divested of lush celluloid images and piquant music, it sure does feel like a line from a manifesto, or a lament.

Allen ultimately deflates the very nostalgia that his movie indulges; the film’s comic climax takes Gil and his girlfriend Adriana, a ’20s Frenchwoman, back to Paris during the Belle Epoque era, the period that she worships as brazenly as Gil worships the Paris of her own time. “I’m from the ’20s, and I’m telling you the golden age is la Belle Epoque,” she insists. But really: “Midnight in Paris” is not a hit because of the director’s clear-headed attitude about the blind worship of earlier, supposedly more interesting times. It’s a hit because of the clothes, the music, the cultural references and the comic star power of the Paris writers and artists we’ve read about in school. It’s a hit because it’s a warm bath in another era, and a blessed escape from this one.

J.J. Abrams’ Steven Spielberg pastiche “Super 8″ was not merely a paean to the filmmaker’s adolescence in the late ’70s and early ’80s — an era that spawned such early Spielberg classics as “Jaws” and “Close Encounters” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “E.T.” — but a valentine to the last great age of analog media, the Carter-Reagan-Bush I era, when records were on vinyl and films were shot on film, and both could be looked at, lifted, touched. Abrams went so crazy re-creating Spielbergian, late’70s lens flares that there were times when the actors’ faces were partly obscured by horizontal bands of blue light. A telling moment at a drugstore showed the teenage hero waiting to get his Super 8mm film back; in the days — days!! — leading up to that glorious moment, he looked as anxious as a young father in some mid-20th century sitcom, pacing around in a hospital waiting room and smoking cigarette after cigarette until the doctor arrived with the good news. And while Abrams’ “Super 8″ was playing in multiplexes this past summer, Spielberg himself was finishing his epic “War Horse,” which is set during World War I but strains to evoke the shots, camera moves, music, pacing and tone of a 1940s Hollywood prestige picture. (During a recent New York preview screening, Spielberg said he was hugely influenced by 1940s John Ford films, particularly “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” and “How Green Was My Valley.”)

“You’ll never be a great writer if you fear dying,” Hemingway tells Gil in “Midnight in Paris.” “Do you?”

“Yeah, I do,” Gil replies. “I would say it’s my greatest fear.”

A more ruminative, searching, open-ended take could be found in Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” a Proustian reverie by way of suburban Texas in the 1950s and ’60s. To watch this movie is to be completely immersed in the mind of another person: ostensibly the narrator, Jack (Sean Penn), but really Malick himself, a generous filmmaker who seems to be remembering his own past because he can’t remember anyone else’s. It’s a tough movie in some ways, filled with confusion, pain, regret and messy Oedipal resentments and desires. But ultimately the look and sound of the film eclipses all of that. What predominates is an overwhelming, at times helpless-seeming urge to escape this horrible, sterile modern prison of virtual being-and-nothingness, and go back to a more casually physical time, a time when you could stay outside all day and all night without your parents worrying about your being raped or doped up or kidnapped by sex slavers or organ thieves or converted to Shariah Law or whatever bugaboo is obsessing modern parents at this very moment; a time when you could fall down and scab your knees, tear-ass through woods and vacant lots, roll around in grass, even strap a poor frog to a rocket and then feel horrible about it later, then come home and clean the dirt out from under your fingernails and sit down to supper with Mom and Dad, who maybe didn’t know quite what to do with you, and perhaps even resented you at times, but loved you unconditionally.

Well, maybe not your parents, but somebody’s.

“The Tree of Life” ends on a beach that might represent the afterlife or that might simply be a metaphorical or figurative space — a place where all Jack’s most beloved fellow beings can gather in one place and just be loved, admired, embraced. It’s a place where the virtual becomes real and the dead return to us, if only for a moment. A place where everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.

“That’s what the present is,” Gil says in “Paris,” responding to the quote that opens this article. “It’s a little unsatisfying because life is unsatisfying.”

I said it before and I’ll say it again: This miniseries is a masterpiece.

And as we gather for the third and final meeting of The Mildred Pierce Club, I am aware that this is a minority opinion. There doesn’t seem to be much middleground in responding to “Mildred Pierce.” Most of my critical colleagues were impressed-but-not-moved or else downright dismissive. The word I keep seeing over and over and over — not just in their reviews but in comments threads  — is “slow.”

What did you think, readers? I didn’t think it was slow, not at all; I thought the pacing was perfect. I’d use the word “deliberate” rather than slow (though this might be a distinction without a difference). I suppose there are a lot of places where Haynes and company could have picked up the pace, or gotten to the point faster. But I didn’t want them to. For me the filmmaking was mostly precise and meticulous and sometimes (as in that seaside scene) majestic, operatic — almost decadent in its willingness to go inside a moment, linger there, and let you experience Mildred’s shifts in emotion as they happened. That moment at the seaside, for instance, could have been wrapped up in about two minutes. But it went on much longer, and I was glad it did. It had an operatic power, not just because of the glorious music coming out of the radio, but because it was all about what we might call “the musicality of the moment.”

What did you think of the central relationship, Mildred and Veda? I had an interesting conversation with a friend last night who said he didn’t understand the constant obsession (among critics and viewers) with whether or not Veda was a “believable” character or whether Mildred and Veda’s interaction was “realistic.” “She is not supposed to be taken literally, if you know what I mean,” he said. “The way Haynes envisions her, she’s almost like this manifestion of all of Mildred’s fears. She doesn’t talk like anybody else in the miniseries. Everything she says sounds like it could be Mildred’s insecurity talking. When they talk to each other it’s almost like Mildred is talking to herself.”

I think that’s spot on; in these final two episodes, particularly, Veda reminded me (in a strange way) of Iago in William Shakespeare’s “Othello.” There’s nothing “real” about Iago. He’s a demonic force whose sole purpose is to torment Othello. “I hate the Moor” is the only thing Shakespeare gives us in the way of psychological exploration, or explanation. Iago isn’t explicable — he just is. Every other character in that play seems real, by which I mean psychologically plausible, except Iago; a monster is coexisting in this play with real people and we don’t question it. So why should there be such tremendous cognitive dissonance about Veda here? (That’s the point of the scene with Veda’s opera teacher telling Mildred that Veda is like a snake — how biblical is that?– and that a person should go see the snake at the zoo, marvel at it, and not try to take it home.)

Which isn’t to say that I find Veda wholly plausible or implausible. As is the case with Iago, this is not an either-or proposition. She’s simultaneously real and unreal — a flesh-and-blood symbol. (She’s brilliantly played by Wood, who puts flesh and feeling on a somewhat abstract conception.) I have unfortunately known a number of parent-child relationships where one party seems intent on undermining or destroying the other, with such concentrated malevolence that if you saw the situation depicted on film you’d think it was exaggerated. The real-life tormenters don’t have Veda’s phenomenal, innate talent (that’s another subject this “Mildred Pierce” delves into — the uncanny, inexplicable appearance of genius in a family that has never shown any evidence of it before). But they have her malignant narcissism — her inability to see other human beings as anything but extensions of herself and means to her end. By which I mean that Veda is a rhetorical device, as my friend said, but she’s also a character, one that seems horribly, at times pathetically human. There were a few points in the final two hours where I felt sorry for Veda, because she is obviously a deeply, perhaps chronically unhappy person. 

I also felt for Veda in the scene towards the beginning of the fourth hour, where her new teacher (the one who will eventually become her voice coach) quetly and definitively shuts the piano while she’s showing what she’s got. If you have never considered the difference between talent and genius, Veda’s rant might seem unjustified here. But artists feel this level of insecurity all the time, and it is rare to see it articulated with such furious eloquence. Veda is right: every town the size of Glendale has at least one Veda, meaning a young woman or man who seems phenomenally talented to everyone else, but who is really just very, very good, not a genius. That seems like it should be than enough to make a person feel wholly satisfied in life, but it’s not enough for Veda, because she knows enough to know what she doesn’t know, and it’s driving her crazy. (When she discovers that she is a genius — with her voice, not with the piano keyboard — it doesn’t merely fullfill her, it somehow makes her angrier, crueler, more evil.)

The scene where Mildred discovers that Veda has slept with Monty (Guy Pearce) is one of the most chilling moments I’ve ever witnessed on television, not because of the act itself, but because of Veda’s unrepentant, even coldly delighted reaction to Mildred’s distress. It’s as if she’s fulfilled by Mildred’s agonized reaction — as if it meant more to her than the tryst itself, which of course it did. (The concert scene where Veda sings her mother’s favorite song to her seems, in retrospect, like a setup for the moment where Mildred discovers Veda in that bed — the kiss before the kill.)

Veda loves sticking figurative knives in her mother’s gut or back and then twisting them. Some people are like that; they’re usually not as talented as Veda, or as much of a self-dramatizing chatterbox, but they do exist. And I think this miniseries has given us a definitive fictional model to measure them against.  This “Mildred Pierce” is about hating someone who loves you (Veda’s reaction to Mildred) and loving somone who hates you (Mildred’s reaction to Veda). It’s a painful thing to experience, and painful to watch, too. But if it’s captured with intelligence and empathy, as it is here, it’s a lovely and horrifying spectacle, misery transformed into art.

But first, our ground rules: 

1. Do not discuss plot events beyond the end of Episode 3, which aired last night.

2. It’s fine to compare the miniseries to the movie or the novel as long as you don’t run afoul of rule No. 1.

3. This article contains spoilers.  Deal with it.

Back to Veda: As played by Morgan Turner (and starting next week, Evan Rachel Wood) she’s a musically talented and beyond-precocious child, and very much the dark mirror of her mother’s ambition — a little monster of entitlement who takes without giving.

I ascribe at least part of her awfulness to the gender politics of parents and children. Little girls have been known to dote on and even idealize their dads while piling all sorts of negative feelings onto their mothers,. That definitely happened in the Pierce household, with Veda treating her father, Bert (Brendan F. O’Byrne), as a flesh-and-blood saint and her mother as scum. 

These dynamics are made even more acute by a couple of traumas: Mildred and Bert’s divorce (which took Bert away from Veda, except on visitation days) and the death of Veda’s younger sister, Moire (“Ray”), which occurred when Mildred was off doing the horizontal mambo with her new lover, the playboy mooch Monte Beragon (Guy Pearce). Last night’s episode, which opened in the aftermath of the youngest child’s death, contained an agonizing moment where Ray saw her parents in the kitchen and immediately embraced her father, ignoring her mother until she finally looked up at her and demanded, “Where were you?”

As more than one commenter pointed out in last week’s recap, Ray died from sudden and catastrophic illness. Mildred’s absence from the house had no effect on that one way or the other. Veda’s implied accusation (and other relatives’ pointed anger at Mildred last week) amounted to a generalized statement of disapproval and resentment, aimed at a middle-class 1930s woman who was breaking all sorts of taboos (getting a job, starting her own business, taking a new lover soon after a divorce) while still raising kids. The scene in this week’s episode in which Veda tongue-lashes her mother after failing to receive a piano for Christmas brought all those resentments out. As Veda admitted, her more cutting remarks came straight from Monte, with whom she’d bonded. In that really twisted scene (which set the stage for Mildred’s breakup from Monte) Veda was hurting Mildred in two ways: showing her that Monte had an easy confidence with Veda that he didn’t have with her mom, and using Monte’s own words to poison and destroy the relationship (by letting Mildred know what Monte really thought of her).

I wonder, do you find Vera believable? And if you don’t find her believable, is the problem the character herself (which comes from James M. Cain’s source novel) or Morgan Turner’s performance?

As my colleague Alan Sepinwall, who is not a fan of the miniseries, says: 

Parental love can blind you to your kid’s faults for a while, but not for year after year, not after everything Veda says and does over the course of the story. And as played by Winslet, Mildred is very far from a sap. She’s a tough cookie, savvy negotiator and survivalist – the material about her rise from desperate waitress to thriving restaurateur is the miniseries’ highlight – and she doesn’t even play her as if she has a blind spot for her eldest daughter. There’s scene after scene of Mildred looking like she knows just how toxic Veda is, yet the demands of the story require her to again and again make decisions that fly against what we can see on Winslet’s face. It’s supposed to be a tale of maternal obsession, but instead 90% of the miniseries features a wise character who randomly becomes self-destructively in thrall to her emotional vampire of a daughter for the other 10%.

Nancy DeWolf Smith of The Wall Street Journal writes:

As for the mother-daughter pathology, perhaps TV shrink Dr. Drew can tackle that some day. It is hard to care when each of them is so annoying in her way. It may be worth noting that in his oeuvre, Cain tended to paint women as evil temptresses or control freaks. Who’s to say that “Mildred Pierce” is not just an idiosyncratic working out of some bee in Cain’s personal psychic bonnet, say, because a controlling mother stomped on his own operatic ambitions by telling him he had no talent.

I think Turner is tremendous in a part that is, for a variety of reasons, exceptionally hard to play, especially for a young girl, and putting it over (and doing a credible job in the piano-playing scenes to boot!). Veda is a bad apple and we’re supposed to find her off-putting, even toxic — a prematurely hostile and bitter person who’s going out of her way to undermine and destroy her mother. There are moments when the two seem authentically, if  unnervingly, bonded — as in the scene after Veda’s first lesson with the maestro; the tearful Veda expresses relief that the hateful old man has decided to take her as a student, and Mildred seems relieved that Veda is relieved.  But such moments are few and far between. I find the generally tense, ugly feeling in the Veda-Mildred scenes credible, if unpleasant.

People don’t like to talk about this, but sometimes parents and children despise each other for reasons that aren’t really anyone’s fault; and sometimes a child, for reasons of temperament or brain chemistry or a combination of nature and nurture factors, is just a straight-up incorrigible brat. It’s bad luck. Whatever errors Mildred might have made as a parent, I think that’s the case here, and it’s part of her tragedy.

But your mileage may vary.

Ground rules:

1. Do not discuss plot events beyond the end of Episode 2, which aired last night.  I want this forum to be enjoyable for all viewers, not just those who know the source text backward and forward,  seen the 1945 film or already watched the whole miniseries via press screeners, pirated copies, whatever. Alluding to future events in super-vague terms that could mean anything  (“… in light of upcoming events,” etc.) is permissible, and might be unavoidable in some cases, but do not go beyond that. If I see any comments that run afoul of rule No. 1, the comment will be deleted. Err on the side of caution, my lovelies.

2. It’s fine to compare the miniseries to the movie or the novel as long as you don’t run afoul of rule No. 1. Self-explanatory.

3. This article and its comments contain spoilers for Episodes 1 and 2 of “Mildred Pierce” (which aired back to back last night). This is a discussion thread. If you haven’t watched Episodes 1 and 2 of “Mildred Pierce,” you should not be reading this.

On to general observations:

As you might know, “Mildred Pierce” has received mixed reviews. There seems to be a consensus on the part of many of my TV critic colleagues that it’s too long, too slow, or too enamored with production design, atmosphere and period detail, and that there’s no good reason for the thing to be five hours long. “I found it a slog to get through,” said my former Star-Ledger colleague Alan Sepinwall. “There’s a very slow pacing to ‘Mildred Pierce’ but not one that should come as a surprise to fans of HBO, which lets its creative people tell full stories,” wrote Tim Goodman of the Hollywood Reporter. “And yet, you begin to wonder when events will accelerate or explanations will be given.”

This is one of those “your mileage may vary” observations. I thought the pace in the first couple of episodes was just right (and continues that way in Episodes 3-5).

More than that, one of the things I like the most about “Mildred Pierce” is how fully it embraces TV’s capacity to linger on an image, moment or conversation — and by lingering, give you a sense of the shape of an event, the little eddies and currents within an interaction. The approach is midway between that of a novel, which can adopt a totally elastic atittude toward time without alienating readers, and standard-length feature films or scripted TV drama episodes, which tend to sprint rather than amble.

I can think of several examples of “Mildred Pierce” ambling to good advantage. One is the opening credits sequence that cuts between Mildred (Kate Winslet) baking a pie and her soon-to-be-ex-husband Bert (Brian O’Byrne) working in the yard, then coming inside to get ready to go out and visit his mistress. There’s nothing in this sequence that couldn’t have been conveyed in a few shots. Indeed, the whole argument between Mildred and Bert that ends with Mildred pushing him out could have been handled in a couple of minutes, tops. And yet we don’t see Bert exiting the house with suitcase in hand until the seven-minute mark, after a striking yet leisurely cutaway from their argument to a series of shots of photographs and mementos of their marriage.  I think this makes the scene more compelling, vivid and sad. And I love that Bert’s departure from the house is played in a wide shot, as if we’re nosy neighbors watching it happen from across the street.

I also liked the scene late in Episode 1 where Mildred goes to visit her friend Lucy (Melissa Leo, seemingly channeling Thelma Ritter) and break news that she’s taken a job as a waitress. Notice the gradual, even agonizing buildup to Mildred’s disclosure and Lucy’s response, with Mildred practically having to squeeze the information out of herself. I think it’s a great approach because it makes Lucy’s reaction — acceptance and encouragement — all the more surprising and reassuring, and Mildred’s discomfort (and finally nausea — rushing into the bathroom and throwing up) more jarring, in a good way.

The first sex scene between Mildred and Monty (Guy Pearce, who could not be more perfectly cast) has a similar depth and expansiveness. It’s practically a little short movie in itself, with Mildred’s mood shifting from excited but apprehensive to ecstatic (in every sense) as she gives herself over to the event. At some point you start to see a flush appear in Mildred’s cheeks and on the end of her nose; that never happens in the standard Hollywood gasping faces/hands-clutching-bedsheets sex scene.

TV has permission to do this — settle into a scene the way you might settle into a warm bath, and linger. And yet it rarely avails itself of this privilege. On most scripted TV dramas, as in most movies, the mentality is more often “Just get on with it!” All climax, no foreplay, as it were.

This deliberate approach to storytelling also lets a tale accumulate an almost subliminal head of steam, so that when a huge event finally happens — such as the death of Mildred’s youngest daughter near the end of Episode 2, which sparks enormous guilt and self-flagellation on Mildred’s part and “I knew she was a bad mother!” scorn by some of her relatives — the impact is (or seemed to me, at least) more shattering.

I thought the aftermath of the death — Mildred literally getting as close to her remaining daughter as she could, by crawling into her bed and embracing her — captured the weird psychic twilight of sudden traumatic loss better than almost any similar scene I can recall. The slow ramping-up is what made it possible. You know what I mean: That sense of discombobulation and disbelief: Did that happen or did I dream it? How did I get from there to here? What day is it? What year is it?

I also liked the slow accumulation of detail in Episode 2 that takes us right into the middle of Mildred’s bid to enter the restaurant business. Movies often show people embarking on grand schemes of one sort of another, including business schemes, but stint on the nuts-and-bolts particulars. Haynes and his co-screenwriter, Jon Raymond, must have sifted Cain’s novel as patiently as prospecters panning for gold; many of the details of real estate acquisition and remodeling and restaurant supply and logistics come straight from the book.

Hell, I liked just about everything in these first couple of episodes — but reasonable people may differ, so I’ll stop the recap here and throw the floor open with some questions:

• Do you like the pace? 
• Do you like the casting — particularly Winslet, whom critics seem to have decided is either perfect and brilliant or colorless and disappointing?
• Are you familiar with Haynes’ previous, often highly stylized and artificial films — and if so, what do you make of the more laid-back, naturalistic approach he’s taken here? 
• Finally, how do you feel about the character of Mildred’s elder daughter, Veda, played by Morgan Turner in the early episodes, and Evan Rachel Wood later on? She’s a precocious pill from the get-go and only gets worse (and more destructive) over time, and there’s nothing Mildred can say or do to win her over — although there are a few moments where I thought I could sense authentic feeling between them, some kind of mitigating mother-daughter love, even if there was a touch of Stockholm syndrome to it. Does the miniseries do a good job of explaining the roots of Veda’s animosity and brattiness, and Mildred’s inability to connect with her? Or does it offer little explanation? Either way, do you think a miniseries or movie or novel has an obligation to explain why characters are the way they are, or is it acceptable to just present them?

Over to you, dear readers.