Misery loves company.
While it contains little in the way of supernatural horror, Dolores Claiborne might just be one of Stephen King’s cruellest ironies, fashioning Dolores’ hard life into a northern New England spin on the Greek myth of Cassandra as she, having lied once and been believed, finds herself in a position of telling the truth only to be doubted. Her situation is less a battle between guilt and innocence, than between what people expect of a woman like her and what she dares to say out loud. Adapted from Stephen King’s 1992 novel, the film strips it down to the story of a woman haunted not by ghosts, but by memory, misogyny, and the way circumstances themselves can be weaponised against her.
King’s book was a single, furious confession; one woman’s voice unbroken and unfiltered and although widening the range of perspectives, screenwriter Tony Gilroy and director Taylor Hackford find its cinematic rhythm without diluting its fury. Kathy Bates, returning to King territory after Misery, delivers a performance carved from endurance and contempt. Her Dolores is no caricature of small-town grit; she’s a woman who’s had to put up with so much shit she’s got none left to give about what people think of her. Accused of murdering her wealthy employer Vera Donovan (Judy Parfitt), she’s still shadowed by the suspicious death of her husband decades earlier that all but the dogged Detective Mackey (Christopher Plummer) concluded was a tragic accident. The film may reveal Dolores’ backstory gradually throughout its runtime, but Bates injects that history into every utterance and expression. Dolores isn’t a hard woman, she’s a hardened women, calloused and sore from a life of graft.
The real story, though, is the one she can’t tell without her daughter. Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Selina returns to the island to report on the case and ends up unearthing her own half-buried trauma. Their estrangement is thick with blame and silence, and Leigh’s taut, controlled performance captures the emotional stasis that trauma demands, a life lived in a clenched jaw. Their scenes are electric: neither gives ground easily and what emerges is a roadmap of survival passed from one generation to the next, more scar than story.
David Strathairn plays Dolores’s husband, the novel’s ghost of the past, with a terrifying casualness, the kind of man who believes harm done behind closed doors doesn’t count. There’s no theatrics to his malice, just the oppressive dread of knowing exactly what he’s capable of, and how little anyone else will care. Judy Parfitt’s Vera Donovan, the haunting of the present, is no less monstrous a creation at first glance, but her nastiness is a facade, lacquered over the years to a shine. She’s Dolores’s employer, yes, but also over time her unlikeliest confidante, their relationship built on mutual recognition; a solidarity between women shaped by men’s failures. Parfitt plays her with crisp imperiousness, every so often letting the humanity beneath peek through – but only for an instant.
Driving at the truth, regardless of the morality is Christopher Plummer’s Detective Mackey, a man who has been trying to pin Dolores for her husband’s death for decades, and who when Vera dies under suspicious circumstances, finally sees his chance. Plummer plays him not as a villain, but as something subtler: a man who believes so strongly in his own convictions, he can’t recognise his bias. Mackey isn’t really interested in the truth, only in closure, and Dolores has finally reached the point in her life where she is through accommodating the needs of the men in her life, regardless of the unjust consequences.
Hackford delivers some of his most focused directorial work here, keeping the camera tight and unforgivingly intimate, the flashbacks stark and unflinching. Gabriel Beristain’s cinematography trades the Maine coast’s postcard potential for something saltier and more hostile, skies the colour of old bruises, water that looks ready to pull you under. Even Danny Elfman’s score understands the assignment, abandoning his usual whimsy for a stoic, restrained despair.
Dolores Claiborne doesn’t indulge in saccharine redemption arcs or courtroom triumphs. Its victories are quieter, and often pyrrhic. It’s a Stephen King adaptation that understands horror doesn’t require monsters when people will do just fine and with Bates, Leigh, Strathairn, Parfitt and Plummer all on top form, every performance leaves bruises.
Dolores Claiborne may not get the recognition that The Shawshank Redemption or Stand by Me routinely get, but it’s a boldly bleak story of survival of circumstances that might have broken the likes of Gordie LeChance or even Andy Dufresne.
