Spoilers below. Triggers: child molestation.

Surprisingly, Selena St. George may be the least sympathetic female character in Dolores Claiborne even though she’s the victim upon whom the story’s events center. Fictional female abuse victims written by people who either don’t have a clue what abuse is like or think the audience wants it sugar-coated tend to go in one of two directions: they are a bit sad and tragic, but somehow happily married and working normal jobs, or they take on … READ MORE

Spoilers below.

While Dolores has an understandable reason for killing her husband, Vera Donovan is a different story. She killed her husband because he regularly committed adultery and ignored Vera completely when she tried her utmost to win his affection through displays of niceness she reserved for him alone.

My first reaction is to think murder was not really called for in this situation, so I had to ask myself why Stephen King included this little wrinkle. Was he endorsing Vera’s solution … READ MORE

Spoilers below. Triggers: mentions of child molestation.

The first aspect of Dolores Claiborne I want to talk about is its raw demonstration of what it’s like to be a woman abused by a husband. Joe is far from a criminal mastermind, and yet he manages to hold his wife and daughter in bondage to him, and the system helps him every step of the way. Abuse tactics are honed through generations of repetition, imprinted on child by parent so that even … READ MORE

“Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto.”– said with slight variations by Dolores, Selena and Vera.

Dolores Claiborne is Taylor Hackford’s faithful adaptation of a Stephen King novel about a woman who may have murdered her husband and gotten away with it. That summary hardly touches this complex story, though.

This is one of the few perfect movies to show to someone who wonders why women stay in abusive relationships or why women don’t stand up to … READ MORE