Rating of
3/4
Great Drama, Stephen King as his finest.
TheWolf - wrote on 08/02/07
"Dolores Claiborne" tells the story of a woman who is accused of murdering the wealthy woman she worked for as a maid in Maine. When her daughter Selena finds out that her mother is accused of this crime, she immediately returns home from New York, leaving her job as an important reporter behind for a while. But she doesn't return to support her mother as you might expect. No, she's almost certain that she did it and she seems to try to get a good story out of it. But gradually she finds out what really happened and in the meantime some awful things about Selena's troubled childhood, the awful family life,... come floating at the surface again.
I know that I said in the beginning of this review that most movies with such a subject are plain crap, but there are always expectations to every rule and "Dolores Claiborne" certainly is one of those exceptions. It was written by Stephen King and it shows. The man knows how to build up suspense and certainly can give you an uneasy feeling while reading his books or watching one of 'his' movies. And "Dolores Claiborne" has a lot more depth than you might expect at first. The only thing is that they have managed to disguise it, not giving away too much information at a time. Only at the end of the movie you'll fully understand what has happened and what the reason was for both women to react the way they did.
What I also liked, next to the story, was the way everything is shot. All the scenes in the present are shot in those cool blue tones, but these blend seamlessly into the flashbacks that were shot in vivid colors. This gives an extra touch to the story that certainly works. You know exactly what is the present and what is the past, but those colors also add a lot to the drama.
