She was one of the worst people in Hollywood, according to Bette Davis. To Jack Nicholson, she was “the Dreaded Dunaway”. Steve McQueen unflatteringly nicknamed her Done Fadeaway on the set of The Thomas Crown Affair, either due to her extreme weight loss or because he thought she was a no-mark. She wasn’t. Faye Dunaway remains an icon of Hollywood’s second golden age, a fantastically talented actor and a central figure in the celebrity gossip sphere. But behind the delicious anecdotes was a woman struggling with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, a darkness that is hinted at but never fully explored in this documentary from the director Laurent Bouzereau.
Our first encounter with Dunaway, now 83, provides a presumably tongue-in-cheek demonstration of her trademark belligerence (or is she genuinely this rude?), as she demands that Bouzereau begin shooting immediately (“I’m here now, come on!”). Yet she goes on to gamely narrate her evolution from Dorothy Faye, brought up by a single mother in Tallahassee, Florida, to imperious Oscar winner (we also hear from her friend Sharon Stone, Barfly co-star Mickey Rourke, director James Gray, her son, Liam, and others). Dunaway’s rise – via Elia Kazan’s rep company, then Broadway – was swift, the logical result of impressive skill, incomparable beauty and sheer will. She seized the zeitgeist with meaty, interesting projects: we hear how a spate of career-defining films from the 60s and 70s – Bonnie and Clyde, The Thomas Crown Affair, Chinatown, the amazingly prophetic Network – captured the shifting spirit of the era (nodding respectively to political violence, women’s lib, governmental corruption and the dehumanising effect of TV). She was a serious star with infamously high standards and the chutzpah to ensure they were met.
Such is the splendour of Dunaway’s imperial phase that Faye initially doesn’t feel like hagiography; the gushing seems justified. It’s only when we get to the early 80s, when her career dramatically declined, that it becomes clear how varnished this tribute is. As the star of Mommie Dearest, the 1981 adaptation of Christina Crawford’s explosive memoir about life with her film-star mother, Joan, Dunaway was ridiculed for her melodramatic performance and the film flopped. This documentary cleaves tightly to the four-act story structure and this is the third-act crisis – but the resolution must see the actor restored to glory. Mommie Dearest’s eventual reclamation as a camp cult classic (thanks to its unintentional hilarity) is part of the documentary’s warm and fuzzy final stretch, which also chronicles Dunaway’s move towards left-field cinema and her current status as a legend. In reality, the second half of her career was full of disaster that is only partially covered here (her 1993 sitcom It Had to Be You is cited as an example of her prescient embrace of TV; nobody mentions that it was cancelled after four episodes).
Faye doesn’t paper over all the cracks. In order to centre the most intimate insights Dunaway provides – she references her alcoholism and discusses her relatively recent bipolar diagnosis – it must acknowledge her status as a notoriously difficult colleague. Yet the documentary doesn’t ask many difficult questions. That’s likely because of the heavy involvement of its star, as well as Liam, a close friend of the director. Admirably, Dunaway has always had healthy boundaries when it comes to her privacy: we witness her classy deflection of queries about her affair with Marcello Mastroianni in a 1972 interview, and here she rightly refuses to delve into the story behind Liam’s adoption. She is willing to talk about her mental health but only up to a point – we hear very few concrete details. There are a glut of hair-raising rumours about her lack of professionalism, on-set feuds and abusive tirades, none of which are properly addressed in this film.
One thing Faye does pull off is its clever, stylish structure, which neatly equates Dunaway’s most famous roles with parts of her own character: she played an alcoholic in Barfly, for example, and a workaholic in Network. Towards the end, her son even suggests that her mothering resembled the demented Joan Crawford character in Mommie Dearest, who memorably attacked her daughter with a wire coathanger; Liam says Dunaway’s moods were “almost like Mommie Dearest. She just has that energy”. Their relationship appears close and loving – Dunaway is moved to tears when discussing the joys of parenthood – but the comparison suggests there is much trauma here, too.
Yet Faye isn’t an exposé. It’s a misty-eyed homage made in collaboration with its subject – and one that relies too heavily on allusion and inference to be truly candid or revelatory. If you want to luxuriate in Dunaway’s potent screen presence, just watch the films; if you’re after juicy yet unverified scandal, read a Reddit thread. This documentary falls into the gap between them, offering an incomplete but still troubling portrait of a singular diva.
• Faye aired on Sky Documentaries and is on Now in the UK, and on Binge in Australia.
