Winslet brings a bristling psychological intensity to Mildred's need to please the horribly greedy and transparently pretentious Veda (a thankless and frankly ridiculous character, regardless of who's playing her). Mildred sacrifices everything, including pride, to provide for her ungrateful and manipulative bad-seed daughter Veda (initially Morgan Turner, in later chapters Evan Rachel Wood), who desires nothing more than to escape from her clingy mother's provincial and occasionally combative grasp. She cooks up, and emotes, a storm as a self-made single-mom businesswoman in hard times, starting a chain of home-style restaurants literally from scratch - this movie should come with a recipe book. Want more Matt Roush? Subscribe to TV Guide Magazine now! This nearly six-hour adaptation is an over-indulgently languid showcase for Winslet to shine as the iconic and ultimate Mother Martyr.

Cain's blunt realism, director/co-writer Todd Haynes ( Far From Heaven) fashions a much more mellow drama. Stripping away the '40s movie's pulp melodrama and fatalistic noir framework, hewing with almost fetishistic devotion to novelist James M. Pierce considers taking her hubby's lumpy business partner as a lover. 'From now on, honey, you're fast.' So says a jaded neighbor lady (newly minted Oscar winner Melissa Leo) to Mildred, left by her failure of a husband to raise two girls alone in the Depression, as the unhappy Mrs. It's the kind of role an actress would kill for - it won Joan Crawford a 1945 Oscar and is likely to reap Emmy and other honors for Kate Winslet - but I wish I could say HBO's deluxe but draggy miniseries redo of Mildred Pierce was to die for.

Mildred pierce book review