Reappraisal: The Shipping News (2001)

The Shipping News is a disappointing adaptation of E. Annie Proulx’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. This sad tale concerns a wimpy loser, known only by his last name Quoyle (Kevin Spacey), who is not particularly good at anything. His loveless six-year marriage to trampy barfly Petal (Cate Blanchett) ends when she dies in a car wreck, after selling their daughter Bunny (played by triplets Alyssa, Kaitlin and Lauren Gainer) to a black market adoption ring. His Aunt Agnis (Judi Dench) convinces Quoyle to start over by moving with Bunny to their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Taking a job as a novice reporter at the local newspaper, Quoyle learns that a new life, however, can uncover old family secrets that are best left hidden.

Proulx’s muscular writing reveled in the Newfoundland landscape’s harshness, the brutality of existence there, and the characters’ devastating flaws. While the book has a certain folksy charm, director Lasse Hallstrom has turned it into a feel-good movie about a man’s redemption and reduces the book’s powerful revelations and ghoulish discoveries to cheap comic bits. Scripter Robert Nelson Jacobs’ makes a few significant changes from the book, some more effective than others. Quoyle now has one daughter instead of two, which solves the book’s lone miscalculation that the selfish Petal would have stayed around long enough to have a second child. An important subplot about incest, only gradually revealed in the novel, however, is bungled, when a previously unseen character blurts out the truth with ridiculous expediency.

Although a terrific actor, Spacey is dead wrong for Quoyle, described as a large, heavyset man with lumbering gait and slow wit. His eyes always convey that something is going on in that head, and you are never convinced that this is not a smart man. Julianne Moore has a thankless role as single mother Wavey, similarly wounded butwhose only function is to awaken Quoyle’s squashed spirit, while Blanchett’s screen time is miniscule. The best performance belongs to Dench, as a jaded cynic whose sass belies years of emotional hardships. Stripped of Proulx's sad stoicism, the film is wildly uneven, with some good performances but slack direction, evocative imagery but a glacial pace.
- by Jonathan Lewis