Chemistry between Leigh, Bates strikes nerves in `Dolores'
She has dazzling technique, a wide, dramatic range and an unwillingness to take the easy way out. Yet none of her past performances really satisfied me. Her risk-taking led to disaster in The Hudsucker Proxy , and her work in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle was curiously distant and hollow.
But Leigh is too good to keep misfiring. Now, after having seen Dolores Claiborne , I am completely sold on her.
Tony Gilroy adapted the script from a Stephen King novel about the aftermath of wealthy and decrepit widow Vera Donovan's (Judy Parfitt) fatal fall down the stairs of her house.
Detective John Mackey (Christopher Plummer) suspects the widow's housekeeper, Dolores Claiborne (Kathy Bates), of murder. Mackey is hell-bent on nabbing her because he's convinced that Dolores prepared a fatal "accident" (retold in flashbacks) for her husband 20 years ago.
That's the novel's premise. The film deals more with the relationship between Dolores and her daughter Selena (Leigh), who has returned home after a 15-year absence to seek the truth about her past.
Dolores Claiborne is not exactly a great film, but its lead actresses redeem it somewhat.
Bates slips into her role with frightening ease. Compare her deadpan wit here with her sunny comic disposition in Fried Green Tomatoes . The cruel years have worn away everything in Dolores except a hard-bitten sense of humor and grim determination.
Bates presents more than a prickly facade. She shows us raging passions and uncommonly fine-tuned sensibilities.
Damaged, pill-popping Selena is Leigh's most deeply felt role, yet she doesn't come close to histrionics. Critics have accused her in the past of being mannered, mechanical, overwrought, and too inside her character to communicate to the audience.
In a showdown with the detective at the inquest, it must have been tempting to play up the dysfunctional daughter and put all else aside to save her mother from a murder indictment. Leigh underplays this scene so well that you don't notice that she's giving a Big Speech.
The chemistry between Bates and Leigh raises the level of both their acting, in their portrayals of fiercely withdrawn women prone to lashing out at everyone else. They've been on edge for so long that they've become used to handling their emotions as gingerly as explosive materials, particularly around each other.
You can always sense the tenuous bond between mother and daughter. In spite of all their bickering and painful memories, they connect with each other often enough to give you a tragic sense of how much healthier this relationship might have been under different circumstances.
Bates and Leigh expose every raw nerve and suppressed emotion through their utterly unsentimental performances. As a mother/daughter act, it's uncannily suggestive and complex.
The rest of the film isn't on such high ground. Director Taylor Hackford does little with his material, aside from a few artsy shots.
He deserves credit for respecting his actresses' intentions, and for not trying to turn the film into a soap opera.
The cinematographer, Gabriel Beristain, turns in a ham-handed performance. He soaks the flashbacks in nostalgic gold, drowns the present-day scenes in gray and succeeds in making a solar eclipse look singularly cheesy. Composer Danny Elfman is also over-the-top; this score isn't up to his usual standard.
This is a sexist film, though not in the typical Hollywood way. It is anti-male. Dolores' husband, Joe (David Strathairn) is boorish, lecherous, larcenous, alcoholic and emotionally, physically and sexually abusive, a most unappetizing specimen of a man.
When Joe dies, the scene is a cue for a cheap, hooray-the-bastard's-dead applause. Strathairn has triumphed over iffy material before ( The Firm , The River Wild ), but he is unable to do anything with this one-dimensional role.
Dolores' employer bumps off her philandering husband and then says, "Husbands die, Dolores, and they leave their wives their money." Men: can't live with 'em, gotta kill 'em.
It matters little to the overall success of the film, since the women are portrayed with such skill and humanity.
If 1995 turns out to be as weak as 1994 in terms of strong female roles in movies, then we'll have to cling to our memories of Kathy Bates and Jennifer Jason Leigh in Dolores Claiborne .
This item appeared in the Arts & Entertainment section of the April 7, 1995 issue.
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