How 'Mildred Pierce' stacks up to its predecessor

James M. Cain (1892-1977), would-be opera singer and virtuoso of the vernacular, wrote some of the most unnerving romances in American fiction. In

Double Indemnity

and

The Postman Always Rings Twice

, illicit lovers pledge devotion by conspiring to murder. In

Mildred Pierce

, they conspire to something possibly worse.

Joan Crawford at her most Kabuki-like was the long-suffering Mildred of Michael Curtiz's heavily expurgated, heavy-breathing 1945 whodunit based on Cain's 1941 book. You know, the one about the Depression-era homemaker who leverages pie-making talents into a chain of restaurants but earns neither the respect nor the love of her manipulative daughter, Veda, with whom she is besotted.

Kate Winslet at her most transparent is the striving title figure in Todd Haynes' faithful and feverish Mildred Pierce, a three-parter premiering Sunday night at 9 and continuing the next two Sundays on HBO. Haynes, who frames Winslet through windows and windshields, ever a prisoner of confined spaces, is more sympathetic than Cain or Curtiz was to Mildred's primal double-binds. That is to say: When Mildred fulfills herself as a woman, she falls short as a mother. When she succeeds as an entrepreneur, she intimidates those she loves.

Beyond the sensational performances of Winslet, the immensely talented Morgan Turner (Veda at 11), from Montgomery County, and Evan Rachel Wood (Veda at 19), Haynes' telefilm is as hot and tasty as one of Mildred's pies. It resonates on many levels.

It is intriguing to compare Haynes' take to that of Curtiz, to listen to how Mildred Pierce, the American King Lear, speaks to different generations. It is likewise interesting to see how fidelity to the source material can be too much of a good thing.

Curtiz's terrifically entertaining movie has a casual relation to the novel. Released at the end of World War II, just as women were eased out of the workforce to make way for returning GIs, it plays as a cautionary tale of a female breadwinner too busy putting food on the table to notice that her spawn is a viper.

The movie production code forbade depiction of Mildred's healthy sexual appetite, and Crawford played her as an unyielding figure armored in mannish suits. The film's takeaway messages: That a woman cannot be both successful and sexual. That she cannot be both businesswoman and mother. And that, as King Lear mourned, "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child."

Haynes' version has the freedom to engage the sexuality, class anxiety, and maternal second-guessing that suffuse the novel. Released during an era of economic insecurity when female breadwinners are unexceptional, his Mildred is a pop opera about a successful businesswoman who pulls herself up by her ankle straps from working class to upper class, pursues her own work and her own pleasure, but is denied the thing she most desires: daughterlove.

Winslet's Mildred, clad in soft crepe and clinging jersey frocks, is the picture of sensuality. While Haynes does not condemn Mildred for her sexual or professional drive, he shows her complicity in Veda's monstrous selfishness. He shows how she behaves more like lover than mother and how Veda, equipped with Goneril's sense of entitlement and Lolita's cunning, has all of Mildred's bad traits and none of her goodness.

Haynes' Mildred is about 95 percent faithful to Cain's story and rueful dialogue. This is a both a good thing and not so much. Fidelity is desirable in a spouse but not always in a literary adaptation. Dialogue that looks sharp to the eye can sound dull to the ear.

His Mildred is compulsively watchable, and divides among the good, the great, and the not so good.

The good. Haynes and gifted cameraman Ed Lachman do an exceptional job of conjuring 1930s Los Angeles, contrasting the harsh sun of middle-class Glendale, where the Pierces live, and the diffused light of leafy, upscale Pasadena, the enclave to which Veda aspires. By frequently framing characters through windows, director and cameraman visually emphasize their terrarium lives.

The great. Always a sympathetic director of actors (see: Far from Heaven, I'm Not There), Haynes gives his actresses and Guy Pearce (as Mildred's snaky lover, Monty Beragon) the space and time to create characters who run the color spectrum from purple to green. (Brían O'Byrne, as Mildred's feckless spouse, Bert, doesn't make much of a first impression but gets better as the series progresses.)

Winslet's earthy Mildred is brisk, gravity-bound, sexually passionate, a woman who moisturizes with elbow grease, lubricates with rye, and is subservient to no man. As her focus shifts from restaurants to supporting Veda's operatic ambitions, that briskness gives way to bone-weariness.

With her affected accent and accessories, Turner's Veda initially seems like any other preteen tyrant. But this young actress plays Veda as both appealing and appalling. Her haughty performance dovetails nicely with that of Wood, whose graceful and airy Veda floats above the pedestrian world that Mildred inhabits.

Haynes' larger-than-life characters and production values are big, testing the limits of the small screen. The outsize story and emotions cry out for the bigger canvas of movies or opera.

The not so good. The telefilm's pace is at times excruciatingly slow, with so many sequences of characters and their chrome-ribbed automobiles that you could mistake it for car porn.

Whenever possible, Haynes and co-screenwriter Jon Raymond retain Cain's dialogue. But as Cain himself explained, he wrote for the eye, not the ear. While Haynes gets the mood right - and he's a terrific visual storyteller who gives an insider's perspective on the worlds of restaurants and of opera - his characters have words, not voices.

The language does not snap, like the crisp patter of its 1945 predecessor adapted by Ranald MacDougall and Catherine Turney. Turney specialized in tough-talking dames played by Barbara Stanwyck and Ida Lupino, given to declamations like, "She wouldn't give you the time of day even if she had two watches!" Most likely she wrote the deathless line delivered by Eve Arden in the 1945 Mildred: "Personally, Veda's convinced me that alligators have the right idea. They eat their young."

Haynes' Mildred could use some of this pointed dialogue as a commentary on the story, which is one of the saddest in American literature.

Mildred's favorite song is "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows," which Veda superciliously tells her is based on a Chopin impromptu. What's haunting about Haynes' miniseries is how incisively he shows us that Mildred's rainbow is Veda and that Veda's pot of gold is Mildred.