The Shipping News (2001)

Lasse Hollstrom's The Shipping News is two thirds of a great movie, but unfortunately has a first act which introduces it's main character in the most heavy handed of ways, and sort of shoots itself in the foot. It helps that the rest of the film is lovely, but it takes some time to get the sour taste out of your mouth. Kevin Spacey is Quoyle, a meek milquetoast dude who has spent his entire life moping and whining, constantly being walked all over and never standing up for himself, starting right from his childhood relationship with his father (Jim 'sippy poo' Lahey, the glorious bastard). He's so pathetic and such a loser that one wonders where can you go from here, and why did Spacey choose to start his arc at such a sad extreme, instead of livening it up a bit? By chance (and I mean chance) he marries Petal ( half mad Cate Blanchett), a wayward woman-child with barely an ounce of sanity or sensibility in her, and has a daughter with her. She runs off to a tragic self inflicted end, and he is left to raise the girl. Suddenly he receives news that a relative has passed in a small coastal fishing village his ancestral home of Newfoundland, so he packs it in and the two of them head on out there to begin anew. From there it's an awakening for him, and bit by bit his character becomes believable and tolerable, two traits that were simply not there up until this point. He meets a long lost relative (a salty Judi Dench), befriends a local gal (Julianne Moore), starts working for the gruff local newspaper magnate (Scott Glenn, wonderful) and essentially finds a self within him that he never had before, a life to fill the pointless void he's lived in for his whole existence so far. The town is charming, the atmosphere authentic and the acting terrific, including Rhys Ifans and the late great Pete Postlethwaite. I just wish the first act could have measured up to the rest and not stuck out like such a misplaced and noticeable sore thumb. Hallstrom has an ear for intimate, rural set family drama (check out An Unfinished Life with Robert Redford for his best work), and for the most part, this one delivers the goods.

This offbeat but engrossing study of damaged individuals making a life in the wilds of Newfoundland is I suppose typical Lars Hellstrum fare. Slow-moving with on the face of it nothing much happening and slowly at that, is intense slice-of-life piece with just a touch of supernatural mystery at the edges to spice things up.Kevin Spacey is the native Newfoundlander whose moved away from his family roots winding up in a dead-end job as a print-setter, but still haunted and indeed stunted by his difficult relationship with his demanding father, his journey to his troubled adulthood crystallised in an effective montage showing him growing up before our eyes even as he struggles in a sink-or-swim situation his dad has throw him into.Desperate for love and a meaning to his life, he falls hard for Cate Blanchett's wild floozy of a character, the improbably-named Petal who gives him a daughter but quickly tires of both their doe-eyed worship of her until her live-fast, die-young credo reaches its natural abrupt ending. At his lowest ebb in the aftermath of Petal's demise, he's visited by his strange, taciturn, native Newfoundland aunt Judi Dench and with her encouragement decides to return to the run-down family home with her and his wilful daughter to try to rebuild his shattered life. There he takes a job on the local paper and begins a cautious romance with Julianne Moore's similarly circumstanced character.Hellstrum superbly captures the rugged beauty of Newfoundland with his exteriors and the strictures of small-town living with his interiors. It helps that his two leads, Spacey and Moore can seemingly internalise at will and if occasionally they overdo it, at least there are the likes of stolid old Judi Dench with her own dark secret, Pete Postlethwaite stand-in editor at the paper and Scott Gkenn as his domineering editor all working effectively in the background to rein them in.Some of the more fanciful stuff in the narrative betrays a too strict adherence I would imagine to the source novel as I thought a little more concentration on the lives of the central characters at the expense of the local mythology and legends wouldn't have gone amiss plus I promise you will find it tricky, to say the least, to identify with these somewhat strange townsfolk. Set anchor with it though as ultimately this well acted and directed film does deliver its own subtle rewards in the end.

The novel "The Shipping News" caused quite a splash when it was published. I never read it. I remember hearing about a movie being made from the book, and then not hearing much more about it. Now I know why. The film is a queasy concoction of human depravity, despair, beautiful scenery, colorful stereotypical characters, and clairvoyance. Kevin Spacey and Julianne Moore, two of my favorite actors, perform as if they are on Thorazine, and Judy Dench hams it up shamelessly (to her credit, she deepens up a bit towards the end.) I began to feel displaced, as if I wound up in a cold climate when I expected to be in Macondo. Magical Realism very far afield. I suffered through the entire movie out of laziness and masochism, hoping that at least one of the characters would be put out of their misery at its end.

Laborious, ungodly concoction, derived from E. Annie Proulx's novel, plays like a John Ford movie without Maureen O'Hara. Sad-sack single father, having recently lost the mother of his child in a car accident (after she apparently sold the little girl in the black market, who was then rescued), starts life anew in Newfoundland; he earns his mettle as a reporter on the newspaper staff, and falls in love with what appears to be the only single woman in town (this being a cookie-cutter picture at heart, she naturally returns his affections). The clichéd townspeople are made up of bull-headed fisherman and salty old codgers, each with an axe to grind (they're stock figures left over from the 1940s). Kevin Spacey's look of bewilderment and shock is appropriate for the leading character, but acting benumbed doesn't do much for the audience. His rapport with the ladies (Cate Blanchett as the loose-living Petal, Julianne Moore as the well-scrubbed Wavey, and Judi Dench as Aunt Agnis) is warm without being too convincing, while the scenario (cluttered up with pirates and ghosts and curses and a house held down by ropes) verges on the ridiculous. Lasse Hallström directs, shamelessly. *1/2 from ****