The Enigma of Faye Dunaway Is Still Intact Even After A Revealing New Documentary

As a young cinephile in the late ’60s and early ‘70s I was always a little frightened by Faye Dunaway . I was too young to have caught Bonnie and Clyde during its 1967 theatrical run (there’s being precocious, and then there’s being eight), but the adults in my world described it the movie as an experience both seductive and traumatic, with Dunaway providing a great deal of the former quality. Once I was able to see the film years later, I got it: Dunaway, while always ravishingly beautiful in her film presentation, also had a raw hotness as criminal Bonnie Parker, which, combined with her machine-gun etiquette, made my young self a yo-yo of yearning and intimidation.

Faye Dunaway Has No Love for ‘Mommie Dearest’ in HBO’s ‘Faye’ Documentary: “Why Did I Ever Do That?”

Chinatown came out in 1974, by which time a fortuitous growth spurt made me look tall enough to attend an R-rated movie unaccompanied by a parent or adult guardian, and that was another whammy. In that picture, Diane Ladd masquerades as Mrs. Evelyn Mulwray and hires jaunty, jocular divorce-hack detective Jake Gittes to investigate her husband. The trick — one of many in this intricately plotted Robert Towne script — is that she’s not the real Mrs. Mulwray. That’s Dunaway, exquisitely dressed and with eyebrows so precisely tweezed that each one is a work of art, who shows up and, with downplayed buy very definite hauteur, asks Gittes if they’ve ever met. Well, no. Jack Nicholson plays Gittes of course, and when he realizes he’s been duped and now he has to make an account of himself to this regal and imperious woman, you can knock him over with a feather.

New Shows & Movies To Watch This Weekend: The Final Season of Netflix’s ‘Vikings: Valhalla’ + More

CLICK HERE TO GET EMAILS FROM DECIDER

But here’s the thing: by the end of Bonnie and Clyde , and by the end of Chinatown , you are completely in the deep end with these formidable, initially seemingly unapproachable characters. They have not necessarily become your friends, but you’ve become invested in their emotions — they have them! —  and their struggles. And so you leave each movie heartbroken. In Bonnie and Clyde you’re heartbroken, and of course shocked, to see Bonnie’s now conspicuously small body riddled with bullets, covered in blood. And by the end of Chinatown , Evelyn Mulwray has been ground down to a mental and emotional nub before getting snuffed by having her eyeball blown out through the back of her head.

Dunaway did that. The actress is both one of the last old-school glamour goddesses produced by Hollywood and a performer of astonishing depth. The new documentary, Faye , premiering on Max on July 13, is a satisfying account of Dunaway’s career and a moving, not-infrequently surprising portrait of Dunaway the person.

The picture is directed by Laurent Bouzereau, and when I learned that, it made me that much more eager to watch. Bouzereau’s been putting together first-rate multimedia movie companions since the halcyon days of the laser disc format and has since branched out into feature documentaries. His adaptation of my friend Mark Harris’ book Five Came Back , about a quintet of Hollywood directors and their galvanizing experiences during World War II, was spectacular, to name just one. Mark H. contributes his critical acuity as a talking head here, as do critical luminaries Annette Insdorf, Michael Koretsky, and Julie Salamon.

But the true star here is, of course, Dunaway herself. We meet her as she’s being fussy, fanning herself, nostrils seemingly fixed in a flare, trying to get comfortable for an interview. Bouzereau confronts the ostensible elephant in the room right off the bat: the premise of Dunaway the difficult, the prima donna who’s almost impossible to work with. There’s a legendary TV talk show clip in which Bette Davis, herself not exactly a go-along-to-get-along person, says that she wouldn’t work with Dunaway again if they paid her a million dollars. (They had appeared together in a 1976 TV movie The Disappearance of Aimee .)

Dunaway is now 83, and has been through a lot, and has, as sometimes happens, gained some wisdom. She and her son Liam Dunaway O’Neill are very frank with Bouzereau about Dunaway’s various behaviors throughout her professional career and the reasons for it. She reveals that she was diagnosed as bipolar, and describes in some detail how the condition affected her both in life and art. She and Liam also discuss her alcoholism. Liam uses the word “manias” to describe the moods his mother gets in if she’s neglected to take her medication. It’s pretty bracing, and one certainly feels for Dunaway herself.

But none of the revelations really suffice to explain the magic she creates on the screen. Of course one of the other big films under consideration here is Network , for which she won a Best Actress Oscar in 1977. As conceived and written by Paddy Chayefsky, her character Diane Christensen stands in for everything one-time television scribe Chayefsky hated about the rapacious medium that in his opinion traded truth for profit without batting an eyelash. “All I want out of life is a 30 share and a 20 rating,” she admits to her lover Max (William Holden), a Murrowesque figure representing everything television could have been back in the good old integrity days. Diane on the page is a monster (and something of a misogynist conception). Diane, in Dunaway’s hands, does appalling things, to be sure, and is ultimately not an inordinately sympathetic figure. She’s impossible to like but you don’t really hate her, either.

In an archival interview director Sidney Lumet recounts Dunaway asking him where Diane’s “vulnerability” might be. Ruefully, Lumet had to respond that there was none there. Dunaway rolled with that but added a charisma that makes Diane’s indomitability coherent, comprehensible. You got where she was coming from. You almost admire her work ethic. Dunaway took a potential cartoon and made a human being out of her.

And, as the documentary chronicles, she kept doing such marvels again and again. “You can laugh at the movie, but you can’t laugh at her,” Pauline Kael wrote of Dunaway’s performance as Joan Crawford in the inadvertent camp classic Mommie Dearest ; Mark Harris cites that quote approvingly. Sharon Stone, Dunaway fan and friend, goes one better on the subject: “You tell me how you play that part,” she asks bluntly, before saying “If a director puts an artist in that position, then shame on the director.”

The director in question was Frank Perry, not exactly at the height of his powers when he made the picture. In other sections of the documentary Dunaway is generous in her praise of other filmmakers. While she clashed with Roman Polanski on the set of Chinatown , she here attributes the discord to the fact that they were both perfectionists, and she calls him a great filmmaker. James Gray, who directed her in 2000’s The Yards , is by her account “a wonderful director.” And she and Jerry Schatzberg, who directed her in the powerful 1970 drama Puzzle of a Downfall Child , share tender recollections of a relationship both professional and personal.

We also get some insights into 1987’s Barfly ; as Wanda Wilcox, Dunaway is dead-on portraying a drunk whose desire to maintain some kind of presentable façade crumbles when the need for a shot makes itself felt.

Some Dunaway mysteries don’t get fully aired here. Her marriage to hairy rock star Peter Wolf is discussed only in terms of its end; the question of how these two seemingly incompatible types got together in the first place isn’t broached. Well, a lady doesn’t kiss and tell (although the rue Dunaway expresses over the end of her relationship with Marcello Mastroianni here is genuinely touching), and Dunaway is more than a lady: she’s a cinema Grande Dame.

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny . He is the author of the upcoming The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface , published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for pre-order .

For more entertainment news and streaming recommendations, visit decider.com