Dolores Claiborne
Dolores Claiborne (Kathy Bates) works as a domestic servant on a Maine island. The film opens with Dolores having a struggle with her elderly, paralyzed employer Vera Donovan (Judy Parfitt) in her mansion, after which Vera falls down the staircase. Dolores ransacks the kitchen and is then caught by a mailman as she stands over Vera with a rolling pin, apparently intending to kill her. Vera dies and the police begin a murder investigation.
Dolores' daughter, Selena St. George (Leigh), a successful New York City journalist who battles depression and alcoholism, arrives in town to support her mother, despite her own doubts about Dolores' innocence. Dolores insists that she did not kill her employer, but finds little sympathy as the entire town believes she murdered her husband, Joe St. George (David Strathairn) almost twenty years earlier. Some of the town's inhabitants harass her by vandalizing her home, taunting her in the street, and driving by her house screaming at her. Detective John Mackey (Christopher Plummer), who was the chief detective in her husband's murder case, is determined to put Dolores away for life.
Selena also believes that Dolores killed her father, and has not spoken to her mother in over a decade. As the film develops, it is revealed that Joe was an abusive alcoholic, and that one night Dolores had threatened to kill him if he ever harmed her again. Dolores went to work as a housemaid for millionaire Vera Donovan in order to raise enough money to pay for Selena's education, and had gone to the bank to withdraw her money so she and Selena could flee Joe's abuse. The plan backfired, however, when the bank notified Dolores that Joe stole the money from Selena's savings account.
In the present, Dolores says that Vera had thrown herself down the staircase and begged Dolores to put her out of her misery. Mackey refuses to believe her, and reveals that Vera has left her entire fortune to Dolores. Mackey informs them that the will is eight years old, which nearly convinces Selena that her mother is guilty. Dolores decides that it is time to reveal the truth to Selena: she did in fact kill Joe, and it was actually Vera who suggested the plan to her. Dolores says that she had been pushed to the breaking point upon realizing that Joe had been molesting Selena, which Selena furiously denies both in the past and present. After a fierce argument Selena storms out, leaving her mother to fend for herself.
In a flashback to a scene some 20 years before, Dolores breaks down and confesses of her troubled home life to Vera. An unusually sympathetic Vera implies that she had killed her late, unfaithful husband Jack, and engineered it to look like an accident. Vera's confession forms a bond between the two women and allows Dolores to take control of her situation. As a total solar eclipse approaches, Dolores and the young Selena have an argument about Dolores' suspicions regarding Joe's sexual abuse. Selena flees home for the weekend to work at a hotel, where guests have flocked for the eclipse. Joe soon returns from working on a fishing boat, and as a treat, Dolores offers him a bottle of Scotch. After Joe gets drunk, Dolores reveals that she knows that he has stolen from Selena's account and molested his own daughter. Dolores provokes him into attacking her and falling down an old well, leaving him to die as he plunges to the stone bottom.
In the present, Selena hears the story on a tape left for her by Dolores, who had foreseen her departure. While on the ferry, Selena suddenly uncovers a repressed memory of her father forcing her to give him a handjob. Realizing that her mother was telling the truth all along, Selena rushes back to Dolores as she is attending the coroner's inquest. As Mackey makes a case to be sent to a grand jury in an attempt to indict Dolores for murder, Selena tells him that he has no admissible evidence, and that despite an often-stormy relationship, Vera and Dolores loved each other. Realizing that the case would very likely fail, Mackey reluctantly drops the charges. The film ends with Dolores and Selena reconciling on the ferry wharf before Selena returns to New York.
dramatic, violence, murder, flashback