Taylor Hackford (1995)
Dolores Claiborne (Kathy Bates) is a middle-aged dogsbody, suspected of murdering her rich, infirm employer Vera Donovan (Judy Parfitt) in her mansion on Little Tall Island, Maine. The news that the local police are questioning Dolores brings her successful journalist daughter Selena St George (Jennifer Jason Leigh), from whom she’s long been estranged, back home to Maine from New York City. The rift between them dates from the death of Joe St George (David Strathairn), Dolores’s husband and Selena’s father, twenty years previously, for which the daughter believes her mother was responsible. Selena’s suspicions are shared by John Mackey (Christopher Plummer), the detective who failed to put Dolores away for Joe’s death and is determined to make amends by nailing her for Vera’s.
Stephen King’s novel Dolores Claiborne appeared in 1992. A pity it wasn’t decades earlier: the film of the book, entertaining yet heavy-handed, might have been better made in the late 1930s or 1940s. It’s not just that the piece evokes the maternal self-sacrifice and filial ingratitude melodramas of those years. A forties Hollywood treatment would like have been more easily stylised and noir-ishly integrated: in Taylor Hackford’s version, the horror-movie and straight dramatic elements often seem to be competing for the spotlight. The climactic showdown – involving Dolores, Mackey, his young police colleague (John C Reilly), a magistrate (Roy Cooper) and, right on cue, Selena – is cornier and creakier than it would be if the narrative wasn’t elsewhere straining for the realism Hackford deems appropriate for his male domestic violence and abuse theme.
Although the way that theme is realised on screen might seem to modernise Dolores Claiborne, the picture isn’t short of time-honoured suspense mechanisms. It belongs to the protagonist-who-means-to-kill-but-doesn’t tradition (A Place in the Sun is perhaps the paradigm) – it gives two examples of this for the price of one, or just about. Taylor Hackford’s staging of the death of Vera Donovan at the start makes it obvious that he’s omitting important information. We immediately and rightly suspect that Vera doesn’t fall downstairs, as is implied, following a push from her carer. And that, although Dolores is poised to bring a rolling pin down on the prostrate Vera’s head when the postman (Wayne Robson) arrives to interrupt this coup de grâce (and to discover the old woman is already dead), there must be an exonerating reason for that. Halfway through, Hackford reprises the sequences with the crucial bits added. (Vera herself was responsible for the downstairs plunge. She then demanded that Dolores finish her off.) Dolores does lure Joe to his death, doing all she can to ensure that he drops through a hole in the ground to the bottom of a disused well, but he falls – he isn’t pushed. Besides, Dolores’s motive is entirely honourable: she brings about her husband’s death for the sake of Selena.
The film is less feminist than misandrist. The alcoholic Joe St George beats his wife and molests his daughter, as well as filching their life savings. Local lads jeer at Dolores and daub her shack with accusative graffiti. Back in New York, Selena’s editor (Eric Bogosian) appears to bestow journalistic favours on whichever woman in the office he’s currently sleeping with. It’s Vera Donovan who recommends mariticide to Dolores and virtually admits personal experience of the crime, having caused the car ‘accident’ that killed her philandering husband (Kelly Burnett). Vera, whose collection of ornamental pigs seems a nod to the porcine world of Misery’s Annie Wilkes, also coins the film’s key line, repeated by both Dolores and Selena – ‘Sometimes being a bitch is the only thing a woman can hold onto’. One of the highlights of Selena’s career to date was an interview with Jean Harris, who, in 1980, really did kill her long-term lover, Herman Tarnower of Scarsdale diet fame, when he started an affair with his much younger secretary.
Joe St George’s disappearance down the well and the build-up to this coincide with a solar eclipse – and make for what is, visually and atmospherically, the most enjoyably melodramatic episode. The narrative moves back and forth between the 1990s present and the main characters’ past lives, leading up to the eclipse in 1975. Kathy Bates, physically convincing as Dolores at every age, dominates the film. The role doesn’t allow her to have the imaginative ball she had with Annie Wilkes – or the audience to have such a ball watching her. Although she shares some of Annie’s amusing verbal idiosyncrasies, Dolores is conceived as more serious business: Bates gives what is, in comparison to Misery, a self-consciously major performance. But she varies the emotional temperature with great skill. She does a fine job of embodying the toll that years of drudgery, insults and hostility have taken on the heroine. When Dolores sees scenes from her past life before her eyes, Kathy Bates convinces you she’s really seeing them.
Jennifer Jason Leigh is mannered and hollow as Selena although the fault may lie with Tony Gilroy’s script as much as with Leigh: the part has been worked up from a relatively minor one in King’s novel. It feels artificial – merely a plot requirement – that Selena delays facing the truth of what her father made her do until it’s time for her volte face and reconciliation with Dolores. There’s a good continuity, though, between Leigh and the children who play the younger Selena (Taffara Jessica Stella Murray as a five-year-old, the affecting Ellen Muth as a teenager).
Christopher Plummer makes Mackey pompously wily: you really want Dolores to get the better of him. As Mackey’s decent young sidekick, John C Reilly is a nice combination of uneasy and exasperated. A few months earlier, Reilly and David Strathairn had also been together in the cast of The River Wild. Strathairn seemed a rather obvious candidate for his role in the earlier film, though he eventually did a good job. He’s a much more surprising choice for Joe St George and the result is the same. At first, you feel he’s having to work very hard to be a nasty piece of work but Strathairn gradually gets inside Joe. He has a lot of integrity as an actor: in the end, he makes a more startling impression than someone more naturally equipped to play a vicious blowhard might have done. Judy Parfitt is very deliberate as the outrageously demanding Vera Donovan but she’s forceful and witty too. None of the actors needs the assistance of Danny Elfman’s overwrought score.
24 September 2017
