Dolores Claiborne

Year of Release:  1995

Director:  Taylor Hackford

Screenplay:  Tony Gilroy, based on the novel Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King

Starring:  Kathy Bates, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judy Parfitt, Christopher Plummer, David Strathairn, Eric Bogosian, John C. Reilly, Ellen Muth

Running Time:  131 minutes

Genre:  Thriller

New York journalist Selena St. George (Leigh) returns to her home town on Little Tall Island, Maine, when her estranged mother, Dolores Claiborne (Bates), is accused of the murder of her elderly employer (Parfitt).  This is not the first time that Dolores has been in trouble, since 18 years earlier she was accused of murdering her abusive husband (Strathairn).  Obsessive police detective Mackey (Plummer) who investigated the earlier murder is determined to see Dolores behind bars whatever it takes.  As Selena looks into the case, she finds herself forced to return to a past which she has spent her life trying to bury.

The 1992 novel Dolores Claiborne is an unusual one for Stephen King with an absence of his usual supernatural elements and also being written as a single long monologue in the voice of Dolores.  This is one of the unjustly forgotten Stephen King adaptations, an intelligent and dark psychological thriller, moving between the past and present.  While the past is photographed in luscious vivid colour, the colour in the present scenes is washed out, tinged with blues and greys.  This story focuses almost entirely on the female characters.  The key relationship is between the estranged mother and daughter.  Dolores has been alone pretty much for eighteen years, living outside of town, her only "friend" if you want to call her that, is her demanding, caustic employer, Vera Donovan (played by Judy Parfitt), who at the time of her death is very sick, unable to move about, and her and Dolores have a complex love-hate relationship built on mutual need.  Selena is a successful journalist but a depressed alcoholic, who medicates with numerous pills, she works for a manipulative editor (played by Eric Bogosian) who has been having an affair with her, and it is suggested that he assigns stories based on who he happens to be sleeping with.  Kathy Bates is possibly best known for starring in a previous Stephen King adaptation, Misery (1990), and she does make use of her persona from that film here.  Because we are familiar with her as the unbalanced Annie Wilkes from Misery we, like Selena and Mackey, are almost primed from the start to believe Dolores is guilty, and the film plays on our expectations and assumptions as it goes along.  Jennifer Jason Leigh is fantastic as the brittle, damaged Selena, her pale face almost translucent framed by her black hair and all black clothing, like a marble statue, strong but on the verge of shattering.  English actress Judy Parfitt plays the ruthless and very rich Vera Donovan, whose relationship with Dolores is more complex than it first appears.  Christopher Plummer is as good as ever as the oily police detective, who will do anything to convict Dolores because he views his failure to convict her 18 years ago as the "one that got away".  David Strathairn is sleazy and sweaty as Dolores' monstrous abusive husband, but he is also not without. degree of charisma.  Ellen Muth, making her screen debut, does very well as the 13 year old Selena.  The film is cleverly written, with an intelligent and witty script.  Set in Maine, as most Stephen King stories are, but filmed in Nova Scotia, the story takes place in a broken, desolate little town, bleak and wintery in the present scenes, and ripe, but poisonous in the memories of a remembered summer.  the film does occasionally suffer from some very mid-90s technical effects, but these are kept to a minimum.

Written and directed by men, based on a book by a male author, this is a film about women, there are really no sympathetic male characters, with the possible exception of John C. Reilly as the gentle town cop, a film about the relationship between mothers and daughters, between the past and present, and it's about women trying to find their own place in the world and freedom in their own ways, from men, from their past, and from their personal demons.  It's a troubling and powerful film, that deserves to be better known.          

Kathy Bates and Jennifer Jason Leigh in Dolores Claiborne

Misery

Year of Release:  1990
Director:  Rob Reiner
Screenplay:  William Goldman, based on the novel Misery by Stephen King
Starring:  James Caan, Kathy Bates, Richard Farnsworth, Frances Sternhagen, Lauren Bacall
Running Time:  107 minutes
Genre:  Thriller, horror

Paul Sheldon (Caan) is the writer of a best-selling series of historical romance novels featuring heroine Misery Chastain.  However he is sick of the series and in his latest novel concludes the series by finally killing off Misery, so he can begin work on more "serious" literary fiction.  However, driving through the mountain roads of Colorado on his way to deliver the manuscript he is badly injured in a serious car accident.  Luckily he is saved by nurse Annie Wilkes (Bates) and taken to her remote farmhouse.  Even better, Annie is his Number One Fan!  However she is not happy about his new artistic direction, and she is even less happy when she reads the final Misery novel.  Now Paul has to write one special Misery novel, just for her.  Because when Annie  gets upset, people get hurt. Very badly hurt.

This is a gripping thriller, based on a 1987 Stephen King novel.  The novel was very personal to King, and he was reluctant to sell the film rights, although he was happy to let Rob Reiner make the film, because Reiner had made Stand By Me (1986), one of King's favourite adaptations of his work.  The book was inspired partly due to the very negative reaction many of his fans had to King's non-horror fantasy novel The Eyes of the Dragon.  King felt that the horror genre was imprisoning him, and he wanted to branch out.  King was also in the grip of a serious drug addiction at the time he was writing the novel, and later claimed that the character of Annie Wilkes was a metaphor for drugs.

The film is about the "contract" between creators and their audience.  The fans pay their money for what the creator produces, but in return they want the creator to keep on producing the material they like.  However, what happens when the creator wants to do something different?  When they do not want to produce what the fans demand.  Of course there is no contract.  You pay for the individual book, comic, film, whatever, and have no right to tell the creator what to do in the future.  There are of course the people who would strongly disagree with this.  The Annie Wilkes of the world who would say "Oh no, you're ours.  You'll do what we say."

Essentially this is a two-hander between James Caan and Kathy Bates, both of whom turn in fantastic performances.  In the unpredictable Annie Wilkes, who can turn from kindly, caring nurse to violent maniac in an instant, Kathy Bates creates one of the screen's greatest and most memorable monsters, and walks away with the entire film.  James Caan is affecting as the tortured writer.  Caan is a big, physically imposing actor, best known for tough guy roles such as Sonny Corleone in The Godfather and it's interesting to see him almost completely de-powered.   Richard Fansworth and Frances Sternhagen provide comic relief, and a break from the claustrophobic tension in the farmhouse,  as the kindly local Sheriff and his sarcastic wife.

The film mostly concerns itself with the psychological duel between Annie and Paul, however it does have one teeth-clenchingly shocking moment with the "hobbling" scene involving Annie, Paul's feet and a large sledgehammer.

Tense, exciting and sometimes very funny, surprisingly so, this is one of the best Stephen King adaptations, and a truly fantastic thriller.

    Bedside manner:  Kathy Bates and James Caan in Misery

Midnight in Paris

Year:  2011
Director:  Woody Allen
Screenplay:  Woody Allen
Starring:  Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Kathy Bates, Carla Bruni, Adrien Brody, Michael Sheen
Running Time:  100 minutes
Genre:  Comedy, fantasy, romance, time-travel

Have you ever wished that you could escape from the present day and live in an earlier time?  This is the question dealt with in writer/director Woody Allen's 41st film.  Hollywood screenwriter and aspiring novelist Gil Pender (Wilson) takes a holiday to Paris with his fiancee Inez (McAdams).  Gil falls in love with Paris while Inez is much more resistant to it's charms.  In particular Gil imagines what the city would have been like in the Golden Age of the 1920s.  While Inez is distracted by her friend Paul (Sheen), a pedantic pseudo-intellectual who she idolizes, Gil takes to wandering the city streets at night, until one night, at the stroke of midnight, he is picked up by a vintage car and finds himself whisked back to the Paris of the 1920s.  Soon Gil is spending every night partying with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Allison Pill), Gertrude Stein (Bates), Salvador Dali (Brody), Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Cole Porter (Yves Heck), Luis Bunuel (Adrien de Van) and Pablo Picasso (Marcial Di Fonzo Bo).  He quickly finds himself becoming increasingly disenchanted with both the 21st Century and Inez, especially when he meets the alluring Adriana (Cotillard).  However Adriana herself is in love with the idea of her own Golden Age:  Paris in the 19th century Belle Epoque.

This is Woody Allen's best movie in recent years and probably one of the best movies that he is made.  An engaging and effortlessly charming film, which is genuinely funny and directed with a light touch.  The performances are uniformly brilliant and there is a genuine sense of magic .  Despite a brief, half-hearted discussion of contemporary politics (Inez's father (Kurt Fuller) is a fervent Republican and not a fan of the French) this is timeless.  It both celebrates and critiques the yearning for some nostalgic, long departed Golden Age.  Woody Allen's earlier films are often seen as being love letters to his native New York, and this is an unashamed love letter to Paris and is more affecting and beautiful than any of his earlier New York celebrations.  There is a sense here also of Woody Allen rediscovering the magic of cinema itself.  

Entertaining and funny, this is a perfect romantic movie and will appeal to more than just Woody Allen fans.  This film is going to do wonders for the Parisian tourist industry.

Marion Cotillard and Owen Wilson spend Midnight in Paris