FEUD: BETTE AND JOAN (2017)

Eight-part mini-series (mostly) from Ryan Murphy gets so much right seven-eights of the way, the collapse in the final chapter feels like self-sabotage.  Overdrawn & cartoonish at times, but these larger-than-life Hollywood personalities likely wouldn’t have had it any other way.  And not just Joan Crawford & Bette Davis as they vie for leverage filming WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE and HUSH, HUSH . . . SWEET CHARLOTTE, but director Robert Aldrich, mendacious studio head Jack Warner, bitchy gossip queen Hedda Hopper, et al.  Murphy uses phony documentary interviews with Joan Blondell & Olivia de Havilland as helpful scorecard to point the way for non-devotees.  Harmless, but is it needed?  (It’s there to serve as Murphy’s personal mouthpiece.)  But what a dead-on cast: Stanley Tucci particularly funny as awful Jack Warner; and someone had the wicked idea to make Crawford’s housekeeper/assistant Mamacita (a German who Joan at first mistook for a Mexican domestic she was expecting, hence the moniker), played by Jackie Hoffman, a lot like Agnes Moorehead’s housemaid in CHARLOTTE.  As expected, both leads easily hit their marks, but Susan Sarandon gets to have a lot more fun as Bette Davis than miserable Jessica Lange playing the dogged Crawford.  This imbalance the likely explanation of what goes so dismally wrong in the final episode where Murphy tries to even out our sympathies and their career arcs, but can only do so by seriously misrepresenting Davis’s career post-JANE/CHARLOTTE, bringing it to Crawford’s level of non-achievement while missing what real parallels exist.  (Joan made tv with a young Steven Spielberg/Bette with a young Ron Howard.  Later, Davis turns into Crawford on her last completed film project THE WINDS OF AUGUST against Lillian Gish.)  He even suggests that CHARLOTTE flopped.  (It actually did very nicely.)  Skipping over Crawford’s weird (not to say cruel) usurpation of her daughter’s soap opera role and ignoring Davis’s stunning Emmy-winning late work on STRANGERS.  If it doesn’t fit Murphy’s grand thesis, it’s out.  Leaving a bad taste in your mouth after so many bonbons and bon mots.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Often lost in the argument, HUSH . . . HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE deserves a fresh look.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/06/hush-hush-sweet-charlotte-1964.html