Faye Dunaway documentary embraces a difficult woman

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Faye Dunaway took risks, racking up three best actress Oscar nominations (and one win) for playing a string of problematic women who dared the audience to have their backs. In turn, Dunaway herself was equally admired and feared, and she rarely felt the public’s warm embrace. So it’s understandable that after decades of polarizing press, the now-83-year-old feels safe revealing herself only to Laurent Bouzereau’s friendly and defanged documentary “Faye” – a far gentler portrait of a difficult woman than everything else on her resume.

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Honestly, it’s pleasant to witness Dunaway get the kid gloves treatment. In lieu of harsh questions, Bouzereau pokes affectionate fun at her foibles with B-roll of their sit-down. The film (streaming in Canada on Crave) opens with her taking control of his production before, it seems, she was aware that the camera was recording. Dunaway wants to angle her shoulders just so; she wants a glass of water, not a bottle; and she wants to start shooting now because she’s ready to go. Once the tape is rolling, she volunteers that she’s difficult – in fact, she admits it, comfortably – empowering Bouzereau and the editor Jason Summers to splice in these bits as acknowledgment. Yes, Dunaway is headstrong, because she wants everyone else on a set to match her urgency, fastidiousness and iron will.

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Later, there’s a montage of Dunaway’s addiction to lip balm, a time-wasting tic that aggravated Hawk Koch, the assistant director of “Chinatown.” (“Pain in the ass,” he grumbles in his interview.) Still, Koch is also the one to balance the scale with a story about the time Roman Polanski was so irritated by Dunaway’s cowlick that he ripped out her hair. Yet Polanski’s obsessive perfectionism got him anointed as a genius.

Bouzereau knows these behind-the-scenes stories well; he’s delivered dozens of documentaries on the making of legendary films, including “Chinatown, “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Network.” As he doesn’t appear to have had THAT much time with Dunaway, he pads “Faye’s” running time with digressions on the cultural impact of her hits. We’re always glad to listen to film scholars like Mark Harris, Dave Itzkoff and Columbia professor Annette Insdorf, but there’s no need to take up space inserting a clip of Howard Beale’s “mad as hell” speech that doesn’t even show Dunaway’s face.

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But maybe those classics ARE her biography. Early on, Dunaway’s son, Liam O’Neill, says, “I think she’s all of her characters,” a point that comes to feel increasingly true. Like Bonnie Parker, Dunaway was an ambitious Southerner who believed she was destined to become a star. (One of the wonders of her childhood archival footage is watching those cheekbones emerge.) Robbing banks with Warren Beatty’s Clyde Barrow made her famous, and the parallels between her on- and off-screen lives continued to mount.

Dunaway was a workaholic taskmaster in a male-dominated entertainment industry (“Network”), a self-destructive alcoholic (“Barfly”), an underfed fashion icon in love with her photographer (both Jerry Schatzberg, who was her boyfriend when he directed her in “Puzzle of a Downfall Child,” and Terry O’Neill – Liam’s father – who snapped that iconic morning-after shot of her Academy Award win) and, although her son avoids getting into specifics, an emotionally volatile movie star mother (“Mommie Dearest”).

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Dunaway says she felt an “enormous kinship” to Joan Crawford. Even so, she now believes that playing her in “Mommie Dearest” was a mistake. The film has become such a camp classic that one forgets it derailed Dunaway’s career. She thought it was a serious drama; the director, Frank Perry, treated it like a grotesque opera. Sharon Stone, appearing in the documentary as both Dunaway’s friend and a credible advocate for misconceived actresses, is blunter: “If the director puts the artist in that position, shame on the director.” Furthermore, fans of Crawford felt queasy poking into the superstar’s mental illness – which makes it doubly moving when Dunaway speaks frankly about her own bipolar disorder diagnosis and efforts to find stabilizing medication. “I don’t mean to make an excuse about it,” she says. “I’m still responsible for my actions.”

From there, the film struggles to find an appropriate ending for a woman who’s itching to get back to work. Dunaway wants – and deserves – a triumphant, career-capping role in the hands of a director steeled to bring out her best. As her son says, “If she wasn’t in that much pain, would she have been that good?”

RATING: **1/2 OUT OF FOUR

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