Welcome to Maine; a place where attempts to hide alcoholism, smoking, and other troubling behaviors surface like an unpleasant layer in gravy. That’s certainly the case within Stephen King’s world. True to his expansive style, many things are brought up, not everything gets resolved, and characters find themselves immersed in excessive detail. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, except this movie lets those details, along with the accompanying melodrama, weigh down what should be a connection between two women sharing experiences of men who’ve harmed them. It’s a dishearteningly male-dominated mess. I appreciate a rich and atmospheric setting—hello film noir, which often incorporates mystery elements like this one—but somehow the pacing felt off. I thought Kathy Bates did an excellent job as the title character. However, her daughter Selena... I'm not sure if it was more significant in the book, but her discussions about the Arizona story she wants to cover don’t add much of interest. Perhaps it’s meant to illustrate the poor choices she’s made after lacking a family for support, but it feels drawn out. We already understand she's emotionally unstable without that explanation. I also didn't find Jennifer Jason Leigh particularly compelling in her role, though she largely just sits there to reveal plot points and represent something Dolores sacrificed for. She functions as a talking plot device. More engaging is the relationship between Dolores and Det. Mackey, portrayed with gravitas by Christopher Plummer. And John C. Riley as his deputy—his face always brings some life to things. There’s a bit of a destructive perfectionist streak in Mackey, wanting to close a case he never fully resolves to his satisfaction. At times this veers into standard police procedural territory (including a brief courtroom scene – did 90's Hollywood films feel obligated to include those?), but it’s softened by small touches, like throwing a full chamber pot at someone. Whose urine was that, though? Why that fermenting yellow liquid from Vera, a woman we believe Dolores killed? We know that isn’t true, after all, people who exchange old-fashioned insults (“Dolores, I insist that all women who have hysterics in my drawing room call me by my Christian name.”) and share bodily fluids can't truly hate each other. Maybe with one person, but two? Absolutely not. Besides, it’s more enjoyable to team up and condemn an alcoholic sexual predator. Her husband; am I giving too much away by saying she did kill him? Then it would only be 95% Special Victims Unit, not entirely. It might as well cook up all that gravy, a full potful. This leads to two significant moments for Dolores. The back rub and cranium massage is quite vicious, but just a prelude to the eclipse. After discovering Joe has been stealing from her (through his access via having a penis and the bank’s trust in him) and abusing a young Selena, she pushes him down a well while everyone watches the sun black out. This scene is certainly memorable, if only for its almost baroque visual style (heavy use of key light), but also because she sets an Olympic record for long jumping, clearing the hole. Frankly, this should have been the ending; it’s Dolores at her finest, and since she really sets the stage for everyone else to reveal their stories, it's a wonderfully unsettling exit. Instead we wait another quarter of the film to pass. Anything that isn’t about Dolores tends to be too cluttered to be appealing. I suspect she was originally more central, and other parts were added to give actors more to do or provide men with additional speaking time. That’s questionable; King's material is already overly elaborate, but an imitation of King (as practiced by director Taylor Hackford and writer Tony Gilroy) is even more theatrical. Fine, she helped her daughter, who recognizes it nearly twenty years later, and she entertained a pleasant older woman. But the real Dolores—where Bates shines—absorbed all the pain inflicted by an abusive husband, and then leaped to stomp down someone who harmed her young self, like a fierce chicken. A little more swagger, a little more pecking, and we would have had a strong character study between her and her golden egg. You take what you can get, and move on with your day, especially in Maine.

Source on TMDB