The movie begins oddly, with a shot of a staircase, and hearing lots of yelling, such as "Let me go, Dolores!" The shadows tell us there is a struggle at the top of the stairs, and soon after, an elderly lady in a nightgown topples down the stairs fatally. Kathy Bates, Dolores Claiborne, then follows and runs to the kitchen, frantically looking for something. Picking up a rolling pin, she hurries back and looks about to smash the old lady in the face (who is still, just barely, alive), when the mail man comes in and stops her, then discovering the old lady died.

Then switch to Jennifer Jason Leigh's character, Selina, who is arguing with her boss about an apparent journalist job or something. She gets a fax about the "murder" of the old lady and the association with her mom. She travels back to her hometown (I can't recall where it is...) and bails her mom out (not of jail), and they head back to their old house, a run-down, tattering house with graffiti and broken windows and etc all over it. We've learned by now that Dolores was working for the old lady as her housekeeper, and this is an usual case because, like, 20 years earlier, she'd been accused of murdering her husband, and found innocent. Dolores isn't all that well liked in the town...

Selina is not a pleasant person. She apparently despises her mother, drinks and smokes, pops about a thousand pills. Seriously, like Dolores pulls out about 8 different pill thingies from her suit case ("thanks for going through my stuff, mom.."). They settle into the house and Dolores is visited by many different memories. She begins to reintroduce Selina to their past, revealing different things, like how her husband, Selina's father, had beat her severly and treated her terrible. The whole movie starts into a split-story between the present day investigation into Vera (the old lady)'s death and a telling of the secrets of the past. Selina refuses to believe many of the terrible things she learns about her father, and Dolores is ever more disturbed by memories. A jerk-ass cop/detective is intent on sending Dolores to jail for murder, as he failed in the past at locking her up to do with the husband's death. The further we get into the movie, the more it looks like Dolores didn't murder Vera at all. She tells Selina how it all really happened: Vera, very old and decrepete , needed Dolores's help for everything, and was pretty nasty to her about it, and while Dolores was downstairs, tried to throw herself down the stairs from her wheelchair because she's so miserable living this way. Dolores catches her, and that 's the whole struggle of "Let me go, Dolores!" Vera wins and falls down the stairs, and there, left out from the beginning, she pleads with Dolores to finish her off because she doesn't want to live. Thus why Dolores finds whatever she can to kill Vera, and then doesn't succeed. The story doesn't seem too likely to Selina, but eh, what are you gonna do? More memories come, and it's revealed that the father was molesting Selina (grown-up Selina refuses to believe that, but jsut doesn't remember), and Dolores revealed this to Vera, Vera suggested "accidently" killing him. On the night of the eclipse, when Selina was away at her job, Dolores plans out the "accident" and after egging her husband on and having him chase her, she lets him fall down a well and acts as though she has no idea for the next days. Present-day Selina now has her own memories and gets one of ol' Daddy making her give him a hand-job. Ew. She then goes to defend her mother, and does a damn good job for not being a lawyer, clearing her mother of any charges and heading home happily. Woo.

Anyway, despite how boring my summary is, this movie was good. The twists and the split between present and past was very drawing and a neat technique. After watching it, I did, though, have a hard time picturing this being a Stephen King book. There were possibly a few suspenseful moments, but mostly, it was just interesting and dramatic. I'm interested to read the book now, to see if it's usual Stephen King or what. o.o

What I liked:A lot of stuff, actually. ^^;; Umm.. I'll start with the actors. All very good. Until seeing this movie, I could only see Kathy Bates as the infamous Molly Brown in Titanic, but this changed it. She delivered a wonderful performance, as I knew she would, but her character was completely different from the stereotypical Molly I saw her as. It was a nice awakening. She was great in all aspects, the present and the past, very good.
I was a little leery of Jennifer Jason Leigh, after watching only the first half of Existenz and being so turned off by the hash of a movie, but I was willing to give her another chance, on the idea that she was just given a bad script and movie. After all, Jude (Law) was in it (Existenz, not DC), and I love every other movie of his I've seen. I'm glad I did. She was pretty good in this (looking great as a brunette. ^~), though her grin seemed a little off at times. She was great as the destroyed, alcoholic smoker forced to confront her past, and I liked her in it.
Everyone else was good, the dad especially. MAN was he disgusting. You sure hated him, and that's great. ^_^ Kudos to whoever that was.