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.
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