HBO documentary film “Faye” looks into the life and career of Faye Dunaway, a legendary Hollywood actress who has had a fair share of fame and notoriety during last six decades. While she was indeed quite difficult to work with at times as many people said, the documentary presents a bit of her humanity as well as her professionalism as she frankly opens herself a bit in front of the documentary, and the result is fairly compelling on the whole.
After focusing on that famous photographer shot not long after she won an Oscar for Sidney Lumet’s “Network”, the documentary and Dunaway give a brief summary of her early years. Growing up under her rather unhappy parents who frequently had to move from one place to another due to her father’s military career, young Dunaway found some solace and release from acting, and it did not take much time for her to get more serious about acting. She eventually moved to New York City during the early 1960s, and that was where her considerable talent was honed more by her two important mentors: Elia Kazan and William Alfred.
At first, Dunaway was only interested in her nascent stage career in the New York City, and she soon got her breakthrough moment thanks to appearing in the stage production of Alfred’s acclaimed play “Hogan’s Goat”. However, once her good performance in “Hogan’s Goat” drew attention from Hollywood, she moved onto Hollywood as appearing in her first movie “The Happening” (1967), and then there came, yes, Arthur Penn’s groundbreaking masterpiece “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967), for which she received her first Best Actress Oscar nomination.
As riding on the immense success of “Bonnie and Clyde”, Dunaway kept trying to advance more as a strong actress to watch, but that also led to her growing notoriety for being controlling and fastidious. After Norman Jewison’s “The Thomas Crown Affair” (1968), things seemed to be going down a bit for her career, and then she eventually rose again with her Oscar-nominated performance in Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” (1974), but there were a lot of talks about how she and Polanski often clashed with each other on the set. As one interviewee in the documentary, she and Polanski became quite hostile to each other due to a trivial hair problem, but she managed to keep going mainly thanks to her co-star Jack Nicholson, and Dunaway shows some admiration toward Polanski’s filmmaking talent, though she conveniently does not mention at all how his public image has recently been quite tarnished thanks to the #MeToo movement.
In case of her Oscar-winning performance in “Network”, Dunaway is still proud of her considerable contribution to that great film. Sure, her TV executive character can be regarded as a misogynistic caricature of female professional workers just like Louise Fletcher’s evil nurse character in Miloš Forman’s “The One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975), but Dunaway and Lumet presented the character as an icy but seductive goddess of media, and she surely nailed every compelling detail of her ruthlessly ambitious character.
Unfortunately, after her well-deserved Oscar, everything went down for her career during next several decades due to a series of bad choices, and Dunaway is still not so comfortable with talking about her notoriously campy performance in Frank Perry’s “Mommie Dearest” (1981). While she was really serious about embodying Joan Crawford in front of the camera, Perry frequently let her go over the top without any restraint for making a campy melodrama, and her memorable overacting in this film, which deserves to be compared with Al Pacino’s in Brian De Palma’s “Scarface” (1983), has been often ridiculed or imitated since then.
Around that time, Dunaway became more aware of her personal problems. Just like her father, she showed signs of alcoholism, and she also came to see that her frequent mood swings were not just mild mental problems at all. As she frankly admits to us, she actually has a bipolar disorder problem, and her adoptive son Liam tells us that her bad days were not so far from some of the craziest scenes in “Mommie Dearest”.
After “Mommie Dearest”, Dunaway’s acting career was less impressive than before as being saddled with a series of awful films ranging from “Supergirl” (1984) to “Dunston Checks In” (1996), which is probably too humiliating for her to appear in the documentary even compared with “The Wicked Lady” (1983) or “The Temp” (1993). She also tried to return to stage more than once, but that led to more failures despite some successes, and she is still quite disappointed about how the production of what was supposed to be her first diretorial film was shut down due to the lack of budget.
Nevertheless, there were also several good things such as Barbet Schroeder’s “Barfly” (1987), and you may be amused a bit when Mickey Rourke, who also has a fairly bad reputation just like Dunaway, fondly remembers how he and Dunaway usually clicked well together in front of the camera. She also appeared along with James Caan and Ellen Burstyn in James Gray’s “The Yards” (2000), and she certainly brought some class to that film just like her two equally legendary co-stars.
On the whole, “Faye”, which is directed by Laurent Bouzereau, did a good job of presenting Dunaway’s life and career with enough care and respect, and I come to admire many of her performances as getting to know more about her professionalism. Yes, she is too great to be remembered only for that embarrassing moment around the end of the 2017 Oscar ceremony, and we should give some more respect to which she is definitely entitled.
