Screenplay: Tony Gilroy based on the book by Stephen King
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Stephen King makes his living by writing horror stories, so it's odd that the most successful screen adaptations of his work are those outside the boundaries of his usual genre. Stand by Me, Misery, The Shawshank Redemption, and now Dolores Claiborne are all intelligent, well-fashioned films that bear little resemblance to the gory schlock of Sleepwalkers and Pet Sematary.
Dolores Claiborne begins as a dark and dreary murder mystery set in the small town of Little Tall, Maine. The skies above this village are continually congested with clouds, the streets are slick with rain, and the sea is gray and angry. Yet this story, which starts out as an investigation of a suspicious death, soon takes on a more grim and disturbing tone. Memories crowd out the present as the narrative takes us back eighteen years to expose the ugly roots of one family's dysfunction.
Two deaths lie at the center of Dolores Claiborne -- Vera Donovan's (Judy Parfitt) in the present and Joe St. George's (David Strathairn) in the past. After Joe fell into a partially-concealed well during the total solar eclipse of 1975, his wife Dolores (Kathy Bates) was suspected, but never convicted, of murder. The death was eventually ruled as accidental, splotching the previously-perfect record of Detective John Mackey (Christopher Plummer). Now, nearly two decades later, Dolores stands accused of killing her invalid employer and, although the evidence is entirely circumstantial, Mackey is determined to get a conviction.
Dolores' daughter Selena (Ellen Muth at age 13; Jennifer Jason Leigh at age 31), a reporter living in New York city, receives a fax of an article in a Bangor newspaper detailing her mother's suspected involvement in Vera's death. Haunted by her muddled recollections of her father's death, and driven by an unshakable conviction that her mother is guilty, she takes a brief leave-of-absence to go home. Once there, she is confronted not only by the unpleasantness of the present, but by the ghosts of the past.
Parts of Dolores Claiborne are delivered with an unshielded emotional and psychological impact. The script is not consistently at this level -- there are times, most notably during the climactic sequence -- when unfortunate choices have been made, but the overall result is a film that illuminates certain "forbidden" shadows. Generally, mainstream films avoid an honest exposition of the issues underlying the fissure between Dolores and Selena; this is risky material.
The main characters, mother and daughter, are well-written and effectively portrayed. Dolores is a sad, lonely survivor who has, perhaps unjustly, endured a lifetime of misery. Secrets can be an oppressive burden, and Dolores has been worn down by them. Selena, on the other hand, has become an alcoholic and drug-abuser as the result of what she has repressed. Bates and Leigh, two accomplished and versatile actors, are in peak form as they settle into the lonely isolation of their characters -- two very different people whose individual pain is entwined.
Less effort is vested in Dolores Claiborne's male principals. In the case of Joe, this is understandable. He exists only in flashbacks with our impressions filtered through Dolores' perspective. She has no reason to recall him kindly, and Strathairn's portrayal echoes this. Plummer's John Mackey, on the other hand, is basically an unpleasant person. Supposedly, he's a very good detective, but we're never shown anything other than obsession and bitterness.
There's a lot to digest in Dolores Claiborne. The subtle visual effects, which mix digital animation and live-action, form an effective backdrop for a story teeming with emotional turmoil. With their unique method of delineating shifts in time (a person in the present actually walking into the past), the flashbacks are invested with a degree of eerie immediacy. Although the forced ending, which seems deigned to create an unnatural moment of triumph, weakens the climactic catharsis, it doesn't diminish the naked honesty which forms the foundation of Dolores Claiborne.
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If there are any lingering doubts that extreme familial dysfunction (you know, abuse, repressed memory, that sort of thing) has become an official movie cliche, they'll be laid to rest by DOLORES CLAIBORNE (Columbia, R). Based on Stephen King's 1992 novel, this solemnly ludicrous ''psychological'' thriller is like one of Hollywood's old-hag gothics turned into a therapeutic grouse-a- thon-it's Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte for the Age of Oprah. Pudgy and sullen, her hair a miserable mop of dishevelment, Kathy Bates is in full irritable cry as Dolores Claiborne, a middle-aged widow who has been an outcast in her lonely Maine village ever since her husband was killed and she was suspected of doing the deed. Though the police never succeeded in pinning anything on Dolores, everyone in town believes that she's guilty, making her a kind of spooky poster harridan for womanly vengeance: Jean Harris meets Lizzie Borden. In the movie's howler of an opening scene, we witness what may be her second attempt at murder: Dolores scuffling with her employer, the aging rich bitch Vera Donovan (Judy Parfitt), who goes tumbling down the stairs, at which point Dolores ends up standing over the crippled old woman with a marble rolling pin, poised to strike. Talk about misery! With Dolores under suspicion yet again, her estranged daughter, an alcoholic magazine journalist (Jennifer Jason Leigh), shows up in town and, in the midst of hostile soul chats with her mother, proceeds to unravel the mystery behind Dolores' alleged crimes. We get extended flashbacks to the wretchedness that was life with father; they feature David Strathairn, cast against type (and showing the strain) as cruel, drunken Joe, who's such a leering cartoon of a working-class ogre that his scenes are like the domestic- hell sitcom in Natural Born Killers played straight. Even more grotesque are the interludes between Dolores and Vera, who form a sisterhood of shrewish distemper sealed by the line ''Sometimes, being a bitch is all a woman has to hold on to!'' Since there is a mystery, the movie might have been entertaining camp had director Taylor Hackford staged it with pace, style, or a whisper of surprise. Instead, the plot just clunks forward-for two hours and 10 minutes. We have more than enough time to notice all the bad acting, whether it's Bates whining out her lines in a morose Down East drawl or Leigh sounding as blank and bored as if she were reading the script for the first time. What no one connected with Dolores Claiborne seems to have quite realized is that this is the sort of thing that's demented trash when it's done well. Done badly, it's just demented. D+
08:05PM TH
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