The Shipping News Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)January 22nd, 2002
THE SHIPPING NEWS
Rated R, 111 minutes
Directed by Lasse Halstrom
WHERE, WHEN
Now Playing at UA DeVargas
There is something naggingly off-center about “The Shipping News”, and the best place to seek out the problem is at the center. Kevin Spacey plays Quoyle, the central character, and it’s hard to know what to make of him. When we first meet Quoyle he seems pretty close to simple-minded. By the time he’s navigated his way through a series of plot developments in Poughkeepsie, NY, and moved to the old family seat in Newfoundland with Aunt Agnis (Judi Dench) and his daughter Bunny (played by triplets Alyssa, Kaitlyn, and Lauren Gainer), he has managed to develop not only the social muscle to manage life, office politics, and romance, but also the writerly skills to turn out a pretty darned good newspaper column, “The Shipping News”.
I have not read the source material, the best-selling novel by Annie Proulx, but literate friends tell me that the characters in the book were somewhat funkier, homelier, messier, and altogether less savory than those adapted into screenwriter Robert Nelson Jacobs and director Lasse Hallstrom’s neatly-trimmed celluloid version. But this is a Miramax Oscar-season entry, and while characters may be idiosyncratic, they must also be cinematic. So we have a fleshier Kevin Spacey, a subdued Kevin Spacey, a wised-down Kevin Spacey, but by all means Kevin Spacey, a star still trailing wisps of hunk.
A book that runs 352 pages takes its time and builds its world; a movie pared down to a dime under two hours faces different challenges. As it opens Quoyle as a little boy is being thrown into the deep water by his father to see if he can swim, and the same thing happens to the movie. Plot points and scenes are sketched in and hurried past. Oddball, quirky characters must be established in few desperate strokes, and they’re all oddball and quirky here, in a Dick Tracey-like universe populated with names like Petal and Wavey, Tert Card and Beaufield Nutbeem and Agnis Hamm.
Some of these characters make a strong impression. Cate Blanchett, in a hit-and-run twister of an appearance in Act One, whips things to a fine froth with her raunchy rendition of Petal, Coyle’s trashy wife, who cheats on him openly and sells their daughter on the black market. Pete Postlethwaite is dour and grumpy as Coyle’s nemesis on the Newfoundland newspaper, the Gammy Bird, and Scott Glenn adds a knowing leatheriness as the publisher. But Julianne Moore’s Wavey Prowse has a disconcertingly gorgeous Hollywood glow, and Judi Dench as tough old Aunt Agnis carries a dark secret tucked into her jutting jaw without ever managing to give us a satisfactory look at the whole person.
The real star of this movie is director of photography Oliver Stapleton. His camera finds sweep and truth in the rugged beauty of Newfoundland, with stark images of slate-cold churning seas and shivering coastlines, a world where color seems to almost despair of forcing itself onto the eye.
But that same chill dampens the story. It never quite succeeds in catching our fancy and letting us into its world.
More on 'The Shipping News'...
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
