DOLORES CLAIBORNE
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1995 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: An unusual mother-daughter
relationship is explored in a film that begins as
an extremely downbeat character study but which
eventually packs an emotional wallop. This is good
acting, particularly by Kathy Bates and Christopher
Plummer, telling what eventually turns into a good
story. Rating: low +2 (-4 to +4)
A film as hard-going as DOLORES CLAIBORNE is in its first 85 minutes had better work particularly hard to redeem itself in its final act. We have a story that is relentlessly downbeat with uniformly unpleasant characters. One wonders how this tale could possibly come out to make this dreary story worth the telling, or the sitting through. In fact, this turns out to be a surprisingly moving story with some fairly powerful emotional overtones and perhaps it even hasa hero.
The film opens with two women struggling at the top of a staircase. Vera Donovan (played by Judy Parfitt) is thrown down a flight of stairs and her housekeeper, Dolores Claiborne (Kathy Bates) chases after her to see the results. Finding Vera not yet dead Dolores ransacks the kitchen to find the proper tool to finish the job. She is found there standing over the body, marble rolling pin in hand, ready to strike a death blow, not realizing that the woman at her feet is already dead from the fall. And, as it turns out, this may not be the first fall that Dolores arranged. Her husband died in an apparent accidental fall years earlier under very suspicious circumstances. Police Detective John Mackey (played by Christopher Plummer) would like to prove the woman with the rolling pin was indeed a multiple killer.
The drama will have one more major character. Selena St. George (Jennifer Jason Leigh), daughter of Dolores Claiborne St. George--is a successful magazine writer who comes to Bangor to help her mother and to understand the situation. In her first visit to her mother in many years, Selena starts to delve into her mother's life of hard work and harder knocks. Dolores herself seems fixated on her own history and slips all too easily into recollection of the past that intrude on the present.
Kathy Bates does a terrific job in the title role, an unglamorous drudge with long-simmering angers and occasionally a sarcastic wit. She effectively plays a woman whose personality has been mostly rubbed away by disappointments and by the total lack of anyone to care for or about her. Jennifer Jason Leigh who played journalists with affected nasal twangs in MRS. PARKER AND THE VICIOUS CIRCLE and THE HUDSUCKER PROXY, plays yet another journalist and curiously occasionally lapses into the same nasal twang, though here it is hard to account for where she might have picked it up. I have always liked Christopher Plummer as an actor with some range who is better than his roles. But most unusual is David Strathairn as Dolores's abusive husband. His mild personality has till now made him seem like another Henry Fonda.
Director Taylor Hackford uses weather and sky conditions in unusual ways in this film. Flashbacks are signified by sunny skies. Scenes filmed in the present are always shot under dismal gray skies. Not only does this not make sense literally, it doesn't even make sense symbolically since the events under the sunny skies seem just as dismal as those under gray. Just occasionally Gabriel Beristain's camera gives us a startlingly colorful sky effect--always in flashbacks, of course. One sequence under a total solar eclipse brings a surprising special effect into a story that at least on the surface does not seem to need them.
It is ironic, perhaps, that most of the best films based on stories by horror writer Stephen King, tend not to be the ones based on his horror stories. Of the four best films based on his writing--I would say subjectively that they were CARRIE, STAND BY ME, THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, and DOLORES CLAIBORNE--only the first is based on a horror story. And I would rate DOLORES CLAIBORNE a low +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mark.leeper@att.com
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