Mildred pierce how does it end

Wally escapes from the house and runs straight into the cops. Wally, Mildred, her friend Ida and Mildred's first husband Bert are brought to the police station. Bert is charged with Monte's murder because the murder weapon belonged to him. A detective questions Mildred about Bert. Flashback to the past: Mildred and Bert fight over his being out of work after his ex-partner Wally squeezed him out of their business.

Bert's also mad at Mildred for spoiling their daughters Veda and Kay with dance and music lessons, so Mildred kicks him out. Kay's upset but Veda cares more about the new dress mum bought her.

Mildred also kicks Wally out after he makes a pass. Veda suggests Mildred marry Wally because she wants to move to a nicer house but Mildred is appalled. To support the kids, Mildred waits tables with her new friend Ida. Director Todd Haynes, his cinematographer Ed Lachman, and the actors are at peak strength. I love the shot over Mildred and Bert's shoulders of the radio broadcasting the music it has talismanic power , and the close-up of Mildred staring at the radio and listening to it, half the frame blocked out by the back of the radio.

I love the long tracking shot of the stunned Mildred walking to the seaside. Most of all I love that final profile shot of Mildred staring out at the sea at night, after which the camera tracks right.

The screen fills up with blackness that expresses the void Veda's absence created in her mother; there's also a concurrent sense that Mildred's emotions are casting themselves out into the blackness, or onto the ocean, in a kind of cosmic reaching-out. And as we gather for the third and final meeting of The Mildred Pierce Club, I am aware that this is a minority opinion. There doesn't seem to be much middleground in responding to "Mildred Pierce.

The word I keep seeing over and over and over -- not just in their reviews but in comments threads -- is "slow. What did you think, readers? I didn't think it was slow, not at all; I thought the pacing was perfect. I'd use the word "deliberate" rather than slow though this might be a distinction without a difference. I suppose there are a lot of places where Haynes and company could have picked up the pace, or gotten to the point faster.

But I didn't want them to. For me the filmmaking was mostly precise and meticulous and sometimes as in that seaside scene majestic, operatic -- almost decadent in its willingness to go inside a moment, linger there, and let you experience Mildred's shifts in emotion as they happened. Veda will return only if Mildred promises her desired Monte's lifestyle, so Mildred agrees to marry Monte in exchange for a third of her businesses.

It soon becomes clear that something is going on between Veda and Monte. Mildred learns of this only after Monte has sold out his third of her business, leaving her bankrupt. She goes to Monte's beach house to kill him - Shots ring out, but what really happened?

Sign In. Edit Mildred Pierce Jump to: Summaries 4 Synopsis 1. The synopsis below may give away important plot points. Getting Started Contributor Zone ». But Cain's plot lurches away from him, to say the least: the climax is rushed, inexplicable and preposterous, hinging on Veda's turning out to be a gifted opera singer who becomes a great soprano in a few weeks.

And just as suddenly her talent becomes the reason for her cruelty. In a wonderfully unhinged speech, an Italian music teacher tries to explain Veda to Mildred, who asks if, in effect, he's saying she's nourished a viper in her bosom. He replies: "No — is a coloratura soprano, is much worse.

All a coloratura crazy for rich pipple. Unfortunately, this explanation for Veda's perfidy also has the effect of completely unravelling Cain's carefully knotted web of social aspiration, maternal ambition and materialism. Haynes's film seems conceived as a proto-feminist epic saga about power struggles between mothers and daughters, and a cautionary tale about parents who use their children to live out their own hopes and "terrifying wishes".

But Cain's novel is far too inconsistent a fable from which to extract such a moral: it starts out as social realism and descends into a surreally gothic melodrama. If he had seen it through, Cain might have produced a female-centred version of The Great Gatsby , a tragedy of America's corrupt romance with money and success. Instead, it is like a nightmare version of "Snow White", the archetypal story of sexual competition between generations of women, in which Cain can't decide whether to sympathise with the once-desirable but ageing mother or the beautiful, gifted, powerful daughter.

In the end he throws up his hands and makes Veda a "snake, a bitch, a coloratura". If only she were a lyric soprano, evidently all of this mess might have been avoided.