Perception Most Foul

Kathy Bates picked up an ax for Stephen King once again in 1995's Dolores Claiborne. I wouldn't rank it among the best King adaptions but it's not bad, having a great cast, a score from Danny Elfman, and a solid screenplay by Tony Gilroy.

Compared to the madwoman Bates played in Misery, Dolores just isn't as interesting. The movie acts like her motives and actions are a big mystery but, from the beginning, they somehow never really are. I'm not exactly sure why. Maybe because of how director Taylor Hackford initially presents Dolores standing menacingly over the elderly Vera (Judy Parfitt) holding a rolling pin too obviously indicates there's more to the story than what we see.

Dolores is accused of murdering the woman for whom she was sole caregiver. Dolores' daughter, Selena (Jennifer Jason Leigh), comes back to the small Maine town to defend her mother against the investigation conducted by Detective Mackey (Christopher Plummer). Mackey suspects Dolores of foul play here because he suspects she'd murdered her husband, Joe (David Straithairn), eighteen years earlier.

A lot hinges on Selena's memories and the film spends a lot of time with flashbacks. It's a quite self-consciously feminist film with all three of the female leads remarking on how treatment by men forces a woman to be "a bitch". Selena's repressed memory of a sexual assault is a key dramatic point in the film and marks it as a forerunner of a lot of post-Me Too narratives that deal with women re-interpretting past sexual experiences as assault. An important distinction is that Selena has repressed the memory entirely and the signs of having done so are plainly visible in her erratic and nervous behaviour. The film is in this both ahead of its time as well as truly dated. The next serious treatment of this topic should also deal with the dangers and potential abuse of a system where people are legally able to interpret themselves as victims several years after the event.

In any case, Dolores Claiborne intelligently maps out, through the framework of one woman's life, just how many extraordinary obstacles are put in a woman's path. The movie may have succeeded better had Dolores been a slightly more colourful character. Maybe there was some attempt at this, judging from the odd epithets she comes up with. At one point she calls Christopher Plummer's character "the Grand Poobah of upbutt." The trouble is, there's never really any point in which it seems plausible that Dolores is the malevolent creature Plummer's character makes her out to be. Without that potential in play, there's also no true sense of the unfair perceptions a woman would have to deal with in such circumstances. The trouble in such a real life situation would be in the ambiguity. This film never leaves you any doubt.

Dolores Claiborne is available on The Criterion Channel.