Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Faye’ on Max, an Insightful and Revealing Faye Dunaway Biographical Documentary

Celebrity biodocs are like feral cats these days: A half-dozen of them on every streetcorner. But Faye ( now streaming on Max ), a retrospective on the life and career of superstar actor Faye Dunaway, is at least a slightly different story, a subject-sanctioned profile that isn’t afraid to broach touchy subjects with some frankness. The relative bombshell in this film that’s likely to make a few headlines is that Dunaway, long labeled “difficult to work with” – historically, a descriptor more often slapped on women than men – has managed bipolar disorder, depression, and alcoholism for decades. She isn’t making excuses, either: “I’m still responsible for my actions,” she says. And now one can’t help but examine her extraordinary, all-timer work in the likes of Chinatown , Bonnie and Clyde , Network , Barfly and Mommie Dearest through a new lens.

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

The Gist: At the time of filming, it was 45 years to the day since Dunaway was captured in one of the most famous photos in Hollywood history: Slouched in a chair, poolside, the morning after she won the Oscar for her performance in Network , her feet atop scattered newspapers reporting her big win in bold headlines. Her expression is laconic – and iconic: What now? , it seems to be saying. Even if you don’t think you know the photo, you probably know the photo. We’ll return to it at the end of the documentary, but now, we get the usual intro as Dunaway’s friends and associates and assorted admirers and experts – Sharon Stone, Mickey Rourke, her son Liam Dunaway O’Neill, and more – pile on the accolades. “A legend.” “An inspiration.” “A force of nature.” My favorite is “undismissable,” because even though I’ve only seen Network once, and have seen, without exaggeration, thousands of films since, I haven’t forgotten her searing portrait of a powerful TV exec whose moral conscience had been long since eradicated.

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

Other words levied at her: “Strong.” “Volatile.” “Aggressive.” “Complicated.” We watch as she shifts around on a sofa, trying fruitlessly to get comfortable, then demands water in a glass, not a bottle. Take that last part with a big fat grain of salt. That’s Dunaway winking at us. She was born Dorothy Faye Dunaway in rural South Carolina, and she elaborates on why she dropped the first name – Dorothy is that farm girl from the South, Faye is her XXL career persona. She talks about how her father struggled with alcoholism, so her mother asked the Army to recruit him so life at home would be calmer and the bills would get paid. His military career prompted them to move every two years, and this is why, she theorizes, her personal relationships only last a couple years at a time; it’s the cycle she fell into. She worked her way through regional theater to formal arts schooling to off-Broadway to Broadway to Hollywood. The best advice she ever received was from director Elia Kazan, who told her to take all the bottled-up emotions behind her Strong Woman exterior and let them out during her performances.

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From here, Faye director Laurent Bouzereau works chronologically through her career: Early triumphs like Bonnie and Clyde and The Thomas Crown Affair , lengthy examinations of Chinatown and Network – and then Mommie Dearest , which undermined her previous dramatic-powerhouse work with camp infamy. “Before Mommie Dearest and after Mommie Dearest , it’s a different Faye Dunaway,” says film critic Michael Koresky. “It was one of the mistakes,” Dunaway says matter-of-factly. Along the way, she discusses relationships, motherhood, mental illness. Bouzereau zooms through her later career, pausing to note the significance of 1987’s Barfly , which put her in an anti-glamorous role of a Skid Row alcoholic. She talks through her personal and professional peaks and valleys in a manner that’s both measured and revealing. It’s very much Faye we see here, and her singularity is, yes, undismissable.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Faye isn’t quite as raw and revealing as Michael J. Fox doc Still , but it’s far more revelatory than Sly or Pamela, A Love Story or Arnold (just to name a few from only the past year or so!).

Performance Worth Watching: The idea that anybody might upstage Faye Dunaway is idiotic. Full stop.

Memorable Dialogue: Liam ponders his mother’s struggles with bipolar disorder: “If she wasn’t in so much pain, would she have been that good?”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: I dunno about you, but I’m here to talk about Barfly . It’s one of my all-time favorite films, directed by Barbet Schroeder from a (somewhat autobiographical?) script by Charles Bukowski, starring Mickey Rourke as a permanently boozed-up L.A. gutter poet who finds himself in a relationship with Dunaway’s fellow professional drinker. They drink and live and live and drink, and their lives are hard but weirdly beautiful and in the moment. You remember Dunaway as a fashion icon of the ’60s and ’70s, and in this film, her hair is unwashed and her face hardened and her smile is infectious, and it’s as real and funny as it gets.

Anyway. Many celeb biodocs skirt the surface and feel like promotional tools more than stories about hope and achievement and triumph and tragedy. But I feel that it’s impossible to make a “slight” documentary about Faye Dunaway. She’s too heavy, too charismatic, too forthright. She only goes so far into her inner life, but there’s never a moment that smacks of insincerity. It’s a fine balance, stopping before any awkward TMI moments occur, but still touching on difficult truths likely to resonate with viewers. This thoughtful, but never prying glimpse into her character justifies the documentary’s existence, rendering it more than just a vanity project. Bouzereau has gone on the record saying that it was difficult to talk Dunaway into making the film, which we shouldn’t find surprising; any person worth their weight in self-awareness would wrestle with the notion.

The Mommie Dearest segment is especially fascinating – at the same time she chalks it up as a mistake, she owns the work in all its midnight-movie cult glory. It’s a potent illustration of how an artist’s work takes on a new life in the hands of consumers and appreciators. Stone, one of Dunaway’s close, longtime friends, shares especially potent commentary on it; she points a sharp finger at director Frank Perry as the party responsible for making actors look bad on film, and you can’t help but consider Stone’s Basic Instinct infamy.

Bouzereau keeps Faye at 90 minutes, and glances off films and ideas that beg for a longer look. But there’s no arguing with the level of appreciation for his subject, and one senses Dunaway would be pleased with his straightforward, but sensitive approach. We learn new things about her, and that’s huge, but if all it did was inspire us to rewatch all her classics (and maybe some of the hidden gems), it’d still be a success. It might be time to reassess Mommie Dearest , too.

Our Call: Faye is one of the strongest, most insightful and entertaining celeb documentaries in recent memory. And considering how many there are, that’s saying something. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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