Old Yorker

  • Dolores Claiborne

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Taylor Hackford (1995)

    Dolores Claiborne (Kathy Bates) is a middle-aged dogsbody, suspected of murdering her rich, infirm employer Vera Donovan (Judy Parfitt) in her mansion on Little Tall Island, Maine.  The news that the local police are questioning Dolores brings her successful journalist daughter Selena St George (Jennifer Jason Leigh), from whom she’s long been estranged, back home to Maine from New York City.  The rift between them dates from the death of Joe St George (David Strathairn), Dolores’s husband and Selena’s father, twenty years previously, for which the daughter believes her mother was responsible.  Selena’s suspicions are shared by John Mackey (Christopher Plummer), the detective who failed to put Dolores away for Joe’s death and is determined to make amends by nailing her for Vera’s.

    Stephen King’s novel Dolores Claiborne appeared in 1992.  A pity it wasn’t decades earlier:  the film of the book, entertaining yet heavy-handed, might have been better made in the late 1930s or 1940s.  It’s not just that the piece evokes the maternal self-sacrifice and filial ingratitude melodramas of those years.   A forties Hollywood treatment would like have been more easily stylised and noir-ishly integrated:  in Taylor Hackford’s version, the horror-movie and straight dramatic elements often seem to be competing for the spotlight.  The climactic showdown – involving Dolores, Mackey, his young police colleague (John C Reilly), a magistrate (Roy Cooper) and, right on cue, Selena – is cornier and creakier than it would be if the narrative wasn’t elsewhere straining for the realism Hackford deems appropriate for his male domestic violence and abuse theme.

    Although the way that theme is realised on screen might seem to modernise Dolores Claiborne, the picture isn’t short of time-honoured suspense mechanisms.   It belongs to the protagonist-who-means-to-kill-but-doesn’t tradition (A Place in the Sun is perhaps the paradigm) – it gives two examples of this for the price of one, or just about.  Taylor Hackford’s staging of the death of Vera Donovan at the start makes it obvious that he’s omitting important information.  We immediately and rightly suspect that Vera doesn’t fall downstairs, as is implied, following a push from her carer.  And that, although Dolores is poised to bring a rolling pin down on the prostrate Vera’s head when the postman (Wayne Robson) arrives to interrupt this coup de grâce (and to discover the old woman is already dead), there must be an exonerating reason for that.  Halfway through, Hackford reprises the sequences with the crucial bits added.  (Vera herself was responsible for the downstairs plunge.  She then demanded that Dolores finish her off.)   Dolores does lure Joe to his death, doing all she can to ensure that he drops through a hole in the ground to the bottom of a disused well, but he falls – he isn’t pushed.  Besides, Dolores’s motive is entirely honourable:  she brings about her husband’s death for the sake of Selena.

    The film is less feminist than misandrist. The alcoholic Joe St George beats his wife and molests his daughter, as well as filching their life savings.  Local lads jeer at Dolores and daub her shack with accusative graffiti.  Back in New York, Selena’s editor (Eric Bogosian) appears to bestow journalistic favours on whichever woman in the office he’s currently sleeping with.  It’s Vera Donovan who recommends mariticide to Dolores and virtually admits personal experience of the crime, having caused the car ‘accident’ that killed her philandering husband (Kelly Burnett).  Vera, whose collection of ornamental pigs seems a nod to the porcine world of Misery’s Annie Wilkes, also coins the film’s key line, repeated by both Dolores and Selena – ‘Sometimes being a bitch is the only thing a woman can hold onto’.  One of the highlights of Selena’s career to date was an interview with Jean Harris, who, in 1980, really did kill her long-term lover, Herman Tarnower of Scarsdale diet fame, when he started an affair with his much younger secretary.

    Joe St George’s disappearance down the well and the build-up to this coincide with a solar eclipse – and make for what is, visually and atmospherically, the most enjoyably melodramatic episode.   The narrative moves back and forth between the 1990s present and the main characters’ past lives, leading up to the eclipse in 1975.  Kathy Bates, physically convincing as Dolores at every age, dominates the film.  The role doesn’t allow her to have the imaginative ball she had with Annie Wilkes – or the audience to have such a ball watching her.  Although she shares some of Annie’s amusing verbal idiosyncrasies, Dolores is conceived as more serious business:  Bates gives what is, in comparison to Misery, a self-consciously major performance.  But she varies the emotional temperature with great skill.  She does a fine job of embodying the toll that years of drudgery, insults and hostility have taken on the heroine.  When Dolores sees scenes from her past life before her eyes, Kathy Bates convinces you she’s really seeing them.

    Jennifer Jason Leigh is mannered and hollow as Selena although the fault may lie with Tony Gilroy’s script as much as with Leigh:  the part has been worked up from a relatively minor one in King’s novel.  It feels artificial – merely a plot requirement – that Selena delays facing the truth of what her father made her do until it’s time for her volte face and reconciliation with Dolores.  There’s a good continuity, though, between Leigh and the children who play the younger Selena (Taffara Jessica Stella Murray as a five-year-old, the affecting Ellen Muth as a teenager).

    Christopher Plummer makes Mackey pompously wily:  you really want Dolores to get the better of him.  As Mackey’s decent young sidekick, John C Reilly is a nice combination of uneasy and exasperated.  A few months earlier, Reilly and David Strathairn had also been together in the cast of The River Wild.   Strathairn seemed a rather obvious candidate for his role in the earlier film, though he eventually did a good job.  He’s a much more surprising choice for Joe St George and the result is the same.  At first, you feel he’s having to work very hard to be a nasty piece of work but Strathairn gradually gets inside Joe.  He has a lot of integrity as an actor:  in the end, he makes a more startling impression than someone more naturally equipped to play a vicious blowhard might have done.   Judy Parfitt is very deliberate as the outrageously demanding Vera Donovan but she’s forceful and witty too.  None of the actors needs the assistance of Danny Elfman’s overwrought score.

    24 September 2017

  • The Shawshank Redemption

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Frank Darabont (1994)

    The Shawshank Redemption, adapted by Frank Darabont from a Stephen King novella, was something of a commercial phenomenon.  It was never a sleeper but the initial box-office returns were disappointing.  In 1995, however, video rental sales went through the roof; in later years, the film repeatedly drew large television audiences.  (Wikipedia and IMDB indicate earnings of more than $58m against a budget of $25m.)  Shawshank’s popular and critical reputation has also continued to grow.  It didn’t win any of the seven Oscars for which it was nominated but the statement on Wikipedia that it ‘is now considered to be one of the greatest films of the 1990s’ is by no means over the top.  This movie means a great deal to a great many.  According to a 2004 Guardian article by Mark Kermode, which BFI used as their programme note for this month’s screening:

    ‘One viewer described their tape of The Shawshank Redemption as “like a friend in the sitting-room, who talked to me and picked me up when I was down” ’.

    One of the film’s stars, Tim Robbins, is quoted in Kermode’s piece as follows:

    ‘… there isn’t a day when I’m not approached … by people who say how important that film is to them, who tell me that they’ve seen it 20, 30, 40 times, and who are just so … thankful.’

    It’s impossible to gainsay this kind of enthusiasm.  I find it more interesting than I found (most of) the movie to watch.

    Square and unsubtle, The Shawshank Redemption tells, at considerable length (142 minutes), an indomitability-of-the-human-spirit story that’s reasonably good, if not especially original.  The Shawshank State Penitentiary is a prison in Maine (a fictional one:  the actual filming location was the Ohio State Reformatory).  The protagonists, Andy Dufresne (Robbins) and Ellis ‘Red’ Redding (Morgan Freeman), are long-term inmates there.  The redemption of the title refers to how these two make good what seemed bound to be decades of futility.   Andy, sentenced to consecutive life sentences for the killing of his wife and her lover, keeps himself constructively busy.  He escapes, after some eighteen years in prison and painstakingly preparing his getaway during much of that time.  Red, also serving life for murder, spends forty years behind bars.  He finally comes to realise that his friendship with Andy redeems that time in Shawshank.

    Frank Darabont uses prison as a paradigm of privation and presents a life sentence as, in theory, a life wasted.  But he isn’t so preoccupied with metaphor to stint on the violent detail.  With the help of Roger Deakins’s fine, raw lighting of Shawshank, Darabont creates an oppressively bleak atmosphere.  (You appreciate the power of Deakins’s cinematography most in the rare sequences outside the prison.  Unhappy things occur in those too yet there’s an immediate sense of relief whenever the locale changes.)  The various assaults on Andy, by malignant staff as well as prisoners, are gruelling viewing.  This hyper-realistic strain of the film coexists with familiar generic elements – the characterisation of the main group of cons as a band of brothers, for example – but it leaves an impression on the audience.  The grimness makes the happy ending feel earned.

    There’s no denying that ending is strong and that The Shawshank Redemption is structurally clever.  Andy has got away; Red is left feeling glad for him but sorry for himself – ‘I just miss my friend’.  The screen goes dark and you think for a moment this may be the end of the film (to be honest, by this stage I hoped it was).  Far from it.  Red, by now too cynical to make the sincere plea for parole that has tried and failed before, gets it anyway.  The early stages of his life outside are a rerun of what happened to the elderly Brooks Hatten (James Whitmore) earlier in the story.  Released from Shawshank after half a century there, Brooks had become so institutionalised that he couldn’t function as a free man and took his own life.  Red stops short of following suit only in order to honour a promise he made to Andy in jail (and to the audience) – to journey, if he ever got the chance, to a particular hayfield near Buxton, Maine and retrieve something that Andy says he buried there under a stone.  Red finds the hayfield and, under a stone, money and a letter from Andy, inviting Red to join him in Zihuatanejo, Mexico.  Red violates his parole in order to accept the invitation.  He sets off for Mexico with new hope in his heart.  This might seem enough for an upbeat ending but Frank Darabont leaves nothing to chance (or imagination).  Red crosses the border in Texas and, suitcase in hand, arrives on a beach in Zihuatanejo.  Andy is there to meet and greet him.

    The happy reunion and events leading up it are all the more enjoyable thanks to Thomas Newman’s melodious score (you wallow in its emotional uplift even as you realise how the music is working you) and to Morgan Freeman’s acting which, in the closing stages, has a sovereign simplicity and eloquence.  Though he’s awfully good throughout – and he and Tim Robbins work very well together – Freeman has a great deal of jail-spun wisdom to dispense in voiceover.  Stephen King’s novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption is only seventy-one pages long:  you sometimes feel Morgan Freeman must be reading it out in its entirety.  King wrote Ellis Redding as an Irish American:  Frank Darabont did well not only to cast Freeman in the role but to keep in Red’s reply, when asked why he’s called Red, ‘Maybe it’s because I’m Irish’.  It has to be said that not only is Red ethnically distinctive in Shawshank but that the wide range of vices and abuses in evidence there don’t extend to even a whisper of racism.

    As a young man keeping plenty to himself, Tim Robbins is convincing.  He gives Andy Dufresne a preppy look – he’s credible as someone who was a banker in his pre-captivity life.  Andy puts his professional knowhow to good use inside – initially as a desperate self-protective tactic, eventually as a means of ensuring he’s quids in after escaping.  He also then exposes the money laundering engaged in by the crooked, whited-sepulchre governor (Bob Gunton) and others – criminal activity that Andy’s financial nous has enabled.  (With the honourable exception of James Whitmore, the supporting cast isn’t up to much – their performances are strenuously one-dimensional.)  Andy takes over the running of the prison library from Brooks Hatten and, as the one middle-class inmate of Shawshank, is virtually the sole repository of culture and education.  This isn’t a great idea and results in two particularly corny parts of the narrative.  When the library receives as a donation a collection of records, Andy plays part of The Marriage of Figaro over the prison’s public address system.  He’s put in solitary as a result but not before Frank Darabont has shown the prisoners gathering en masse in the exercise yard to listen with rapt attention, their collective savage breast soothed by the charms of Mozart.  (This would have so much better if even one of the inmates had asked, ‘What is this fancy crap?’)  Then Andy coaches a new arrival, a burglar called Tommy Williams (Gil Bellows), to pass an exam.  The contact between them that this involves makes it all the more surprising that Tommy takes so long – ie as long as the plot requires – to ask Red what Andy’s doing time for.  It turns out Tommy was previously in jail with a man who confessed to the murders of which Andy was found guilty …

    Andy has always claimed he was innocent but so have his fellow prisoners:  as Red jokes, ‘Everyone in here’s innocent’ (Red himself admits to being a rare exception).   Even without taking this running gag literally, it makes you wonder about Frank Darabont’s attitude towards custodial sentences generally.  The rampant viciousness and corruption of the system – especially on the part of the staff who represent it – is enough to suggest that Darabont thinks prison is simply A Bad Thing (and the historical setting of the story – it begins in the late 1940s and ends in the late 1960s – seems beside the point).  If that’s the case, you then have to ask what difference it would have made if Andy Dufresne had been a double murderer:  wouldn’t his resourcefulness, his determination to make the best of his punishment, still be worthy of admiration?  In theory, perhaps; in practice, no.  It’s beyond reasonable doubt that, if Andy were guilty, many fewer people would be able to empathise with him.  The capacity of fans of The Shawshank Redemption to identify with its characters, to the amazing extent that lots of them seem to do, depends heavily on believing those characters are doing their existentialist best to rise above a predicament they don’t deserve.

    21 September 2017

Posts navigation