Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 10/05/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, October 5, 2024

Dolores Claiborne (Taylor Hackford, 1995)

Kathy Bates and Jennifer Jason Leigh in Dolores Claiborne

Cast: Kathy Bates, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judy Parfitt, Christopher Plummer, David Strathairn, Eric Bogosian, John C. Reilly, Ellen Muth, Bob Gunton, Roy Cooper. Screenplay: Tony Gilroy, based on a novel by Stephen King. Cinematography: Gabriel Beristain. Production design: Bruno Rubeo. Film editing: Mark Warner. Music: Danny Elfman.

Stephen King is usually likened to Edgar Allan Poe, but the writer Taylor Hackford's film of King's Dolores Claiborne puts me in mind of is Dickens: the Dickens who respected melodrama and created flawed protagonists and convincing (and sometimes redeemable) villains. At 132 minutes, the movie is a little too long, but I wouldn't lose a minute of the performances by Kathy Bates as Dolores and Jennifer Jason Leigh as her daughter, Selena. Christopher Plummer, never reluctant to chew the hambone, threatens to go a bit over the top as Dolores's chief antagonist, Detective John Mackey, but Hackford keeps him under control. Judy Parfitt is superbly acidic as Vera Donovan, though it's a shame her later scenes had to be covered in old-age makeup. And David Strathairn does both the hair-trigger violence and the slimy seductiveness of Joe St. George well. It's also visually engaging, with Nova Scotia standing in for Maine, and Gabriel Beristain's cinematography making the most of the solar eclipse scenes. Dolores Claiborne has been praised for its feminist point of view, but perhaps that's because we so rarely see women dominate an American thriller as well as Bates and Leigh do.