“Sometimes, being a bitch is all a woman has to hold on to.”
Dolores Claiborne isn’t known to mince her words. She doesn’t hold back when she is accused of killing her husband. When she is accused once again of murder, this time of her employer, Dolores has a thing or two to say to her daughter and the police investigators trying to prove her guilt.
Taylor Hackford’s thriller Dolores Claiborne is a riveting portrait of an unapologetic woman. Her name is straight out of a classic black-and-white movie. Her actions and behaviour are a definite shade of grey.
Dolores (Kathy Bates) works as a housekeeper for the wealthy, bedridden Vera Donovan (Judy Parfitt). Vera has died suspiciously. An eyewitness points the finger at Dolores. The investigating officer Mackey (Christopher Plummer), who wasn’t able to prove that Dolores had killed her husband years ago, rubs his hands in glee.
Dolores’s estranged daughter Selena (Jennifer Jason Leigh) doesn’t know whom to believe. The 132-minute movie unfolds as a confessional interspersed with flashbacks, each one coloured by Dolores’s experiences as a wife and mother.
Tony Gilroy’s screenplay is based on the Stephen King novel of the same name. Dolores Claiborne came out in 1995, before it became fashionable for movies to have female protagonists whose backgrounds cast their crimes in a sympathetic light.
Apart from being one of the world’s leading horror novelists, Stephen King has also created fine character studies in his other types of fiction. Dolores Claiborne is one such character – sassy, unrepentant but also deeply damaged. Dolores deals with her husband (David Strathairn) and her demanding employer Vera with the same strength with which she later faces the murder accusations.
Dolores Claiborne can be rented from BookMyShow Stream. Unlike the novel, the film has a non-linear structure, which allows for the dynamic between Dolores and Selena to develop. The fragmented narrative also lets Dolores’s combative personality emerge gradually, adding to the intrigue.
A troubled journalist, Selena resents the woman whom she blames for causing her problem. Dolores, brilliantly played by the formidable Kathy Bates, never makes things easy for herself.
The film rests on the interplay between mother and daughter, as well as Dolores and Vera. Gripping and moving too, Dolores Claiborne doesn’t ask its heroines to explain themselves but rather allows them the rare luxury of being, well, bitches.
Also start the week with these films:
Amy Adams is barking brilliant in ‘Nightbitch’
Surveillance and paranoia in Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘The Conversation’
Bhutan-set ‘The Monk and the Gun’ is a charming comedy about modernity
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