Dolores Claiborne (film)

In 1995, Dolores Claiborne works as a domestic servant for her elderly, partially paralyzed employer, Vera Donovan, in her mansion in the fictional Little Tall Island in Maine. One afternoon, the pair struggles, and Vera falls down the stairs. After ransacking the kitchen, Dolores is caught by the mailman, who sees her standing over Vera with a rolling pin. Vera dies, and the local police begin a murder investigation. Dolores's estranged daughter, Selena St. George, a successful NYC journalist with depression and substance abuse, reluctantly arrives in town to support her mother, despite her own doubts about Dolores's innocence. Dolores insists she did not kill Vera, but the entire town has little trust, as they still believe she killed her husband, Joe St. George, 18 years earlier. Detective John Mackey, who was the chief detective in his murder case, is determined to put Dolores away for life. In 1975, Joe was an abusive alcoholic who, unbeknownst to Dolores, was also sexually abusing 14-year-old Selena. Dolores accepted the job cleaning for Vera to save money to pay for Selena's education. When Dolores discovered Selena was being molested, she went to the bank to withdraw the money so they could flee Joe's abuse, but found that Joe had stolen it. Dolores confided in Vera about the situation, and Vera implied that she had killed her own husband, who had supposedly died in a car wreck, which Vera engineered to look like an accident. Vera's confession formed a bond between the two women and convinced Dolores to take control of her own situation. Dolores says Vera threw herself down the stairs in a suicide attempt, and then begged Dolores to put her out of her misery. Mackey refuses to believe her because Vera left her entire fortune to Dolores in a will, which Dolores knew nothing about. Dolores and Selena argue about Joe's abuse, which Selena has always strongly denied, and Selena storms out, leaving Dolores to fend for herself. A flashback reveals that one day, when Dolores returned home from work, she told a drunken Joe she knew he stole the money and also that he molested Selena. She then provoked him into a rage and led him to fall down a well in their front yard, leaving him to die as he plunged to the stone bottom. Selena hears this story on a tape left for her by Dolores, who had foreseen her departure. While on the ferry, Selena suddenly uncovers a repressed memory of her father forcing her to touch him sexually. Realizing everything, Selena rushes back to Dolores, who is attending the coroner's inquest. As Mackey makes a case to be sent to a grand jury in an attempt to indict Dolores for murder, Selena arrives and tells him he has no admissible evidence; he is only doing this because of his personal vendetta against Dolores, and that, despite an often stormy relationship, Vera and Dolores loved each other. Realizing that the case would likely end with either a dismissal or an acquittal, Mackey reluctantly drops the charges. Dolores and Selena reconcile on the ferry wharf before Selena returns home to NYC. ==Cast==

Castle Rock Entertainment executive William Goldman approached screenwriter Tony Gilroy with the offer to adapt Stephen King's novel Dolores Claiborne, which had been the bestselling work of fiction of 1992. Initially, Gilroy was turned off by certain scenes, including when Vera hurls and smears excrement around her room, as well as by how the story was told: "It had some really fascinating angles, but the whole narrative was one long slog of a monologue from Dolores, which made it feel one dimensional, and to be honest, raw and unrevised." Nevertheless, he took on the project. Hackford encountered several obstacles in pre-production, including neglecting to get Stephen King's approval for Gilroy's revised storyline, and a fruitless search for Little Tall Island, until a phone call with King clarified that it was a fictional location. Later, when Christopher Plummer was cast as Detective Mackey, Hackford became frustrated with his costume designer because Plummer, meant to look like a disheveled cop, kept appearing "like he'd just stepped out of the page of GQ Magazine." Plummer resolved the dilemma by using an eyebrow pencil to draw a large scar across his nose, which gave him a scraggy appearance. Exterior shots of the St. George house were done in Blue Rocks, Nova Scotia, and to achieve the special effects of the solar eclipse without CGI technology, the house was disassembled and rebuilt on what was then the largest blue screen sound stage in existence at a hockey arena. Because the inexperienced effects company misunderstood the pricing from the storyboards, the sequence went 500% over budget. The film's flashbacks were captured with Fuji film stock, which created bright, vivid pastels, and the present was filmed using cold, blue Kodak film, made harsher by desaturating the codec. In order to give tonal indications of erupting memories of buried trauma, Hackford created visual echoes of paintings by surrealist Belgian painter René Magritte, which appear in the scenes when Dolores breaks her window with an ax and when Selena gazes into the mirror on the ferryboat. Dolores Claiborne was filmed in Lunenburg, Mahone Bay, Chester, Stonehurst, and Digby, all in Nova Scotia, Canada. ==Themes and interpretations==

Though typically classified as a drama and psychological thriller, some critics, such as Roger Ebert, have classified Dolores Claiborne as a horror film, The three main women in the story – Dolores, Selena, and Vera – each repeat, mutatis mutandis, "Sometimes being a bitch is the only thing a woman has left to hold on to." ==Reception==

Dolores Claiborne received generally positive reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes it has an 86% rating based on 50 reviews, with an average rating of 6.90/10. The site's consensus states: "Post-Misery Kathy Bates proves to be another wonderful conduit for Stephen King's novels in this patient, gradually terrifying thriller." On Metacritic the film has a rating of 62 out of 100 based on 19 reviews, indicating "generally favorable" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale. Janet Maslin of The New York Times called it "a vivid film that revolves around Ms. Bates's powerhouse of a performance... Only after the film has carefully laid the groundwork for a story of old wounds and violent mishaps does the anticlimactic truth become apparent." Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and praised the performances of Bates and Leigh, saying: "This is a horror story, all right, but not a supernatural one; all of the elements come out of such everyday horrors as alcoholism, wife beating, child abuse and the sin of pride." Entertainment Weekly gave the film a negative review, awarding it a D+ rating and saying: "This solemnly ludicrous 'psychological' thriller is like one of Hollywood's old-hag gothics turned into a therapeutic grouse-a-thon – it's Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte for the Age of Oprah." Box office The movie debuted at number three for the week of March 26, 1995, with $5,721,920. It went on to make $24,361,867 domestically. That ranks it as the 15th-highest-grossing film based on a Stephen King novel, unadjusted for inflation. Adjusting for inflation, it ranks as the 17th-highest. Awards Kathy Bates and Jennifer Jason Leigh were nominated for the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress awards at the 22nd Saturn Awards. Ellen Muth also won the Tokyo International Film Festival Award for Best Supporting Actress. == Home video ==

Warner Bros. released the film on Blu-ray on November 21, 2017, under the label Warner Archive Collection. ==See also==