Favorite movie scenes 93 - The Grouchy Edition 4

Kathy Bates in Dolores Claiborne (1995) is of the same cloth as the cook in Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief (1955) -- this big woman who works at Cary Grant's household, who we only see for a second when the police stop her car, and she yells loudly that she has a right to go wherever she wants without being harassed. Is it a crime to go to the marketplace, now? She asks. Dolores also has a knack for giving the police a slip with her simple, hard-working woman ways, and she is just as justified. A guest at Cary's house compliments her soufflé, describing it as light as air, and Cary gently comments that she once killed a Nazi with those same bare hands that she used to prepare the meal they're now enjoying. She killed him without ever making a sound, he says...

Poor Jennifer Jason Leigh (who plays Kathy's neurotic daughter) is a total emo compared to her mother, and to her mother's imperious boss, Judy Parfitt. Kathy Bates is Kathy Bates, my God, and I happen to remember Judy from The Jewel in the Crown (1984), and believe you me, you don't want to mess with her. She's the original Alien Queen, with cold acid for blood coursing through her veins. What they have and Jennifer's character doesn't is strength, and functionality. No matter how bad things get they keep up appearances, they get angry, they cry when they have to, and they kill if they feel justified, but they don't fall apart or run on pills.

I think I can write this review without giving away any spoilers this time, because the scene my inner-grouch is most fond of (although this movie is an endless repertoire of grouch-satisfying one-liners) is when Kathy's husband is found dead, and she's accused of his murder. She and her daughter (who is still a teenager at that point) are interrogated by the police. Kathy is an un-educated, hard-working, no-nonsense, no beating around the bush kind of woman. Sometimes you have to be a high-riding bitch just to survive, is the movie's mantra. The policeman is this over-privileged guy who has never been pushed into a corner and forced to commit a crime, and so imagines himself to be morally superior. He's driven by this feeling of self-importance and the absolute, unshakable conviction that she is guilty. To him it's all a game of catching the criminal, she's not real to him. So although he interrogates her ruthlessly, he also never gives up on certain social niceties, like addressing her in a very proper, formal manner, as if to make it clear how far above this common murderer he is.

That's why I love it so when she snaps back at his well-bred manners, and the imaginary moral superiority they represent, with:

- If anyone is going to accuse me of killing my husband they can go right ahead and call me Dolores!

We're closer than you think, Mr. Policeman.