Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

I love Kate Winslet and I'll have a hard time writing enough words to say how bad this is. I'm just too old or have such different sensitivities than others. Maybe shows nowadays appeal to the digital , social media folks and i've been sober from Facebook for 2 years. This show was so boring. Kate Winslet is such a great actor but she had 'one face' the whole show which was 'look at me i'm a victim of a spoiled daughter i've created and love kissing her rear end and use me as a doormat'. I kept wanting to see anything, anything at all, that was different than the previous episode but there's nothing to this series. I don't want to knock IMDb because IMDb probably has no control over who leaves these reviews but i really believe people 'connected' with the makers of these shows and their relatives and friends write these reviews but real movie goers don't write these reviews. Nothing new ever happened in this show. Watch the 1st episode and watch the last episode and you've seen the whole series. Sad to say, i've soured on Kate Winslet and will probably avoid her films. All the people at the same look on their faces the whole series. Kate Winslet had this 'poor me' look on her face. Raw, ugly self pity and he daughter is a snot anyone would have straightened out by the time she was 5 years old. Oh, well, to each their own. But, this was bad.

It's 1930's L.A. Mildred Pierce (Kate Winslet) has been abandoned by her unemployed husband Bert leaving her with their young daughters Veda and Ray. She has been trying to make ends meet by selling her home-made pies. She is forced to take a lowly waitress job in Hollywood. Veda finds out and berates her for embarrassing the family. Mildred tells her that she's preparing to open her own restaurant. Mildred is sleeping with Bert's former real-estate partner Wally Burgan who comes up with a place to start the restaurant. Due to tax reasons, the scheme requires Mildred to divorce Bert. She begins dating polo-playing playboy Monty Beragon (Guy Pearce). He does no work but he gets an income from a fading fruit import business. While secretly away with him, Ray gets sick and later dies. With her waitress friend Ida Corwin's help, her chicken-and-waffles restaurants become highly successful. Mildred doles on Veda but she turns more and more rotten.This is a five parts HBO mini-series based on the 1941 novel and most well-known for the 1945 film adaptation. For me, this is a tragic mother and daughter story. The drama only gets great when Evan Rachel Wood arrives in part four. The younger actresses who play Veda in the first three parts do their very best. It's not their fault but the drama is limited to a few interesting scenes. This is a failure of adaptation. The first three parts are too plodding and fails to grab the drama by its throat. The saving grace is Kate Winslet and her never-ending humanity. Despite the slow start, she keeps the story going and there is value to a more expansive exposition than the 1945 film. It would have helped to concentrate this five parter into a two or three parter.

This series bears only a superficial resemblance to the 1945 movie and even less of a resemblance to the novel, not so much in terms of deviation from the actual storyline but in terms of character development. Here the principal character, Mildred Pierce, is transformed from a frumpy, conventional, clueless, hapless, lower middle class woman into a sultry, vivacious, sexually provocative vixen who pursues her goals through sex. Her daughter observes all this and tries to emulate her mother, which produces conflict because there is only room for one vixen in the Pierce home. Mildred goes through men like a knife through butter (to use a well traveled simile). First she drives away her first husband, then shacks up with her lawyer, then hooks up with a member of the "gentry" (he plays polo) who becomes her second husband and boy toy, and then when things don't work out for her, winds up back with her first husband who apparently is a gluten for punishment. Mildred's manipulativeness is matched only by her emotional insensitivity which at times is so transparent that it is a wonder that anyone can be found anywhere hear her. Amazingly, Mildred cannot understand why her daughter, Veda, hates her, revealing a denseness of thought which underscores Mildred's shallowness and limited intellect. If any character in this story has a legitimate gripe, it is Veda. Growing up in an intellectually and spiritually stale environment, and surrounded by people whose sense of social consciousness stops at the dinner table, the bar room or the bedroom, it is not surprising that Veda cannot wait to flee from everything that reminds her of her mother. Her mother's universe is like a gaping black hole (another simile)- it is empty. In fairness to Mildred, she is a product of a culture that values superficiality, so maybe she can't help being what she is - a superficial and pretentious person. As for the series itself, it is high-quality production that captures the smallness and drabness of Mildred's humdrum world. Ironically, set in "sunny" Southern California, almost down the road from Hollywood, in the 1930s, this story is anything but sunny. Most of the scenes are dark, drab and full of shadows, like Mildred's personality. Mildred rarely laughs, her usual countenance is a scowl. She's also cheap and a penny pincher. There is nothing heroic about her. She is distant from her employees. She has one friend - her business partner, and even that friendship is tenuous. When in need of advice or support, she turns to men, but only when it suits her needs. She is selfish, self-centered, judgmental and prissy. Although the men in her life care for her, she treats them like dirt. There is nothing about her that is dignified. But she excels in two areas: sex and cooking, using both to her advantage to survive in a culture where men predominate and people like eating good food. As a parent, she is emotionally and physically abusive. She is not a above physically smacking her daughter. At times the story becomes almost morbid as the dysfunctional nature of the mother-daughter relationship becomes more apparent and extreme. Probably the most appealing character in the story is Monty Beragon who sees through Mildred's pretentious and manipulative ways, for which he pays the price by becoming a convenient target for Mildred's wrath. Kate Winslett's performance as Mildred Pierce is outstanding. In this series she "is" Mildred Pierce. She captures the essence of the character to the letter. Her performance is a tour de force. She deserves any and all accolades she may have earned for her performance. To compare Winslett's performance with Joan Crawford's would be unfair. Both play different characters in different renditions of the story. Guy Pearce's performance is also excellent as the cynical yet honest Monty Beragon, Mildred's lover/second-husband. Beragon is the only one who has the courage to confront Mildred. Far from being a heal, Monty Beragon is symbol of the beaten-down Depression-era man who has lost everything except his name and is trying to salvage what remains of his self-esteem. He is struggling to maintain his dignity while his world is falling apart. He cares for Mildred, and for a while Mildred reciprocates as long as she can use him to satisfy her own physical needs and wish to improve her social status. The series contains explicit sex scenes which further reveal Mildred's sultry and lascivious nature and magnify the lie that she is living. She uses the facade of a rational businesswoman to hide her own social and intellectual inferiority. The only thing she has going for her is sex. She needs men to help prop up her fragile ego. Veda knows this and detests her mother's phoniness which Veda loathes. Mildred believes that everyone wants to use her when in fact it's the other way around - she's using them, shamelessly. If anyone has any doubts as to Kate Winslett's abilities as an actress, one need only to watch this series and those doubts will be dispelled.

This movie, recently presented in separate airings, was highly addictive. At first you think how can a movie based around a woman who makes great pies be that good but, IT REALLY WAS! My husband was hooked as soon as he saw the first episode I had recorded. It was PERFECTLY cast and all the performances were awesome! The setting based in the 1930's was absolutely gorgeous as was the music from back then. It made you wish you could go back in time, before technology, when things were so much simpler! The main theme of the story is universal to this day. This is one of those that if you are just channel surfing and you see it on, you just keep watching it over and over again. There is some nudity; but that aside, this is a a must see!