Documentary Review: Mommy Dead and Dearest (HBO, 2017)
When you hear the word abuse, what comes to your mind? For most, pictures of physical abuse, punches, slaps or whippings with various objects, flash through the mind, or verbal abuse, screaming insults, uttering threat after threat, or constant degradation until the mind becomes warped and the self-esteem is shattered, rings throughout your brain. While those are the two most common types of abuse, there are others out there, like sexual abuse and financial abuse.
Mommy Dead and Dearest, Erin Lee Carr’s (Thought Crimes: The Case of the Cannibal Cop and Click. Print. Gun.) HBO documentary, unveils a new type of abuse that exceeds past the boundaries of any classic abuse, like a mutated version of evil. The story begins, as the title so aptly describes, with the death of a mother, Dee Dee Blancharde, and the prime suspects are her daughter Gypsy Rose Blancharde and her boyfriend, Nick. For a brief moment, it seems as if it will take the route of every other true crime documentary, and then everything changes, washing away every preconceived notion the viewer had.
From a young age, Gypsy was diagnosed with a myriad of health issues, ranging from hearing loss to mental retardation to leukemia and seemingly everything in-between. She had multiple surgical procedures, was confined to a wheel chair, and had a feeding tube inserted. Dee Dee was a single mother doing everything she could to raise her baby the best way she knew how, and Gypsy was a local hero due to her courage to keep fighting and keep smiling throughout all of her issues. From the outside, life seemed difficult, but they had each other, a companion for life.
That was from the outside. On the inside, in their house, in the private conversations between them, life was much different, much darker, much harder to comprehend or understand. Gypsy’s life wasn’t all that it seemed to be, and Dee wasn’t quite the perfect mother that her image portrayed. No, what was actually occurring was one of the worst cases of Munchausen Syndrome most will have ever seen. In a sense, Gypsy was living a nightmare, being paraded for all to see, a captive of the worst sort — one in broad daylight.
The story had the potential to be a confusing mess due to the sheer amount of information it attempts to convey, but Erin Lee Carr feeds everything to the viewer in a clear and concise way, peeling back one layer of the onion at a time. Pace-wise, Carr jumps in quickly then slows it all down, giving just as much as needed to allow each piece of information to sink into the viewer. She has a way of answering questions when the pining for the answer approaches the breaking point.
But for every question that was answered, more arose, leaving me pondering the decisions by every person who came in contact with Dee Dee and Gypsy. Even now, days after I watched it, I still have to know more about the doctors in question. How could they do so little? Have they become that numb to the horrors of humanity that even the most extraordinary of circumstances leaves them unfazed?
In the end, Mommy is a commendable documentary that features an intriguing story and strong pacing. The filmmakers give us deep access to the subjects at hand, but leave us needing more answers as it winds down.
Mommy Dead and Dearest is available for streaming on HBO Go and HBO Now.
