Dolores Claiborne (1995)

Welcome to Maine; where alcoholism, smoking, and all sorts of behavior the aforementioned are trying to cover up creep up on you like bad filling of gravy. At least, in Stephen King’s universe. True to his (excessive) words, a lot gets stirred up, not all of it gets answered, and characters get knee high in lots of details. Nothing wrong about that, except in this movie the details, and the melodrama that comes with them, tend to bog down what should be bonding of two women over the men that hurt them. What a depressingly masculine mess.

I love a good pulpy environment (hello film noir, which often has a mystery element to it like this movie) but someone how the pacing was just off. I think Kathy Bates does a pretty fantastic job as the the title character. Her daughter Selena though...

This one tends to get ignored when people consider the 'classic' Stephen King film adaptations (the first 20 years), but it's very subtle, nuanced, and is basically one of King's finest and more mature works. If it was even possible for Kathy Bates to out-do her Oscar-winning work in 'Misery', she still did so, and nailed it. I'm a huge fan of John C. Reilly, Eric Bogosian (why 'Talk Radio is my favourite Oliver Stone movie and 'Under Siege 2' my favourite Steven Seagal film), David Strathairn, Christopher Plummer and especially, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and the Tony Gilroy script serves them beautifully.

Unfairly, I tend to joke about director Taylor HACKford, but it just may be that he's a more contemporary model of such versatile directors from the past as Norman Jewison and Robert Wise...

Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto.

Dolores Claiborne is directed by Taylor Hackford and adapted to screenplay by Tony Gilroy from the novel of the same name written by Stephen King. It stars Kathy Bates, Jennifer Jason Leigh, David Strathairn, John C. Riley, Christopher Plummer and Judy Parfitt. Music is scored by Danny Elfman and cinematography by Gabriel Beristain.

Plot sees Leigh as Selena St. George, a big-city reporter who travels to her home town island in Maine when her mother is accused of murdering the elderly woman that she was caring for. Her estranged mother, Dolores (Bates), is also widely suspected to have killed her husband and Selena's father some 20 years earlier, even though that was ruled as an accident. As mother and daughter come together, s...