Screen:

...When Dolores's hitherto infuriating boss, a wealthy widow who probably murdered her own (adulterous) husband, learns of her housekeeper' s domestic travails, instant bonding takes place...

...Christopher Plummer, an actor of genius, executes plummy vocal tricks to pick up his paycheck...

...SCREEN DEAREST MOMMY 'DOLORES CLAIBORNE' The eponymous heroine of Dolores Claiborne (Kathy Bates), implicated two decades ago in the murder of her husband but never charged, is now suspected of bumping off her long-time employer, a wealthy widow...

...they are the only features...

...2) Christopher Plummer, all velvet-voiced menace and sneering aquiline features, materializes to torment mother or daughter or both...

...Jennifer Jason-Leigh, a frowning face under schoolgirl bangs, jabs a cigarette in and out of her mouth and furtively studies the ground...

...Yet, despite its topicality, the film is dull because the storytelling is lame and the filmmaking is boring...

...RICHARD ALLEVAARD ALLEVA...

...What makes this film particularly off-putting is a spurious feminism of which only male filmmakers are capable...

...It's no longer fashionable for moviemakers to use Vaseline-coated close-ups to introduce narrated flashbacks ("It was then that I remembered those forever-lost days of horse-drawn carriages and suitors at the door...

...I don't know what Stephen King made of his yarn in print, but on screen it comes across as sheer hokum...

...Prompted by this beneficiary of mariticide, Dolores engineers the demise of her husband during an eclipse which the director stages as the collaboration of Mother Nature with a sinned-against female...

...David Straithern, who usually serves up interesting, layered work, makes the husband a one-dimensional lout...

...At any rate, it's a lot easier than putting memorable female characters up there on the screen...

...This story has possibilities...

...Not for one second does Dolores seem capable of evil, and so, as this two-hour movie unfolds, we simply wait for her inevitable vindication, which, of course, must be accomplished by Selena in order to justify the concluding reconciliation...

...It costs you nothing, may earn you brownie points with liberal critics, and will make the pointy-headed earthmothers in your audiences sigh with delight...

...All the predictable, TV magazine-worthy hot topics strut their stuff: wife beating, child abuse, incest, repressed memories, recovered memories...

...Those aren't the salient features of her performance...

...And, in a world of male moviemaking run by male studio heads to the profit of conglomerates run by male millionaires, it isn't such a bad thing to create movies spiked with a little feminist mysticism...

...3) some local slithers into view to jeer, "Who'd ya kill today, Dolores...

...As for the filmmaking: let present-day Dolores tell her daughter to enter the house and a jump-cut will show us the Dolores of twenty years past telling the child Selena to step inside...

...While a vindictive police detective (Christopher Plummer) gathers evidence, the former housekeeper is taken in hand by her reluctantly dutiful daughter, Selena (Jennifer Jason-Leigh), and the two temporarily cohabit in their ramshackle former home on an island off the coast of Maine...

...And when Dolores's daughter (another woman betrayed by the slimy male in her life) rallies to her mother's cause, she tries to defuse the charge of murdering the widow by emphasizing that "these women loved each other...

...For instance, a hole on the Claiborne property, so deep that it threatens to drop a body into at least the first circle of Dante's Hell, goes undiscovered for years until Dolores finds it just in time to solve a certain problem...

...Nor is this a case of Selena's repressed memory, which is reserved for other matters...

...And all three women share the wisdom that-I paraphrase-in a world of men, being a bitch isn't such a bad thing...

...Let Selena spot an article of furniture from her girlhood and her juvenile self will walk into the same shot to sit on it...

...This actress has inalienable force and dignity, and, in the flashbacks, becomes younger amazingly without much reliance on make-up...

...The best performance is by Kathy Bates...

...There is no suspense whatsoever...

...If Dolores has no shadows in her character but is only and perpetually a righteous victim, what real drama can emerge from the mother-daughter confrontation of the past...

...The filmmakers-director Taylor Hackford and scriptwriter Tony Gilroy (adapting Stephen King's novel)- use these issues not to achieve insight but merely to press our buttons...

...None, but there is certainly no dearth of issues on screen...

...This dramatic deck-stacking not only weakens the movie as melodrama but kills its potential as character-study, too...

...Extreme close-ups of the women's eyes are meant to suggest the Eternal Sisterhood that transcends class barriers or financial brackets...

...Igniting painful memories in each other, the two women snipe at each other, occasionally collide, finally bond...

...Claiborne successfully hides his wife beating from his daughter for her entire childhood, even though he's constantly falling-down drunk and not too bright even when he's sober...

...the treatment snuffs them out...

...but the newest device, already made familiar by TV shows such as "Thirty Something" and "Sisters," of letting youthful versions of the characters share the same shot with their older selves (present tense in the foreground, the past in the back) is just as corny when it's employed as mechanically as the director uses it here...

...Whenever our sympathy for Dolores falters for even a nanosecond, one of three things immediately happens: (1) Kathy Bates gives her estranged daughter a look of infinitely yearning maternal love...