The New York Observer

January 19, 2002

by Andrew Sarris

Lasse Hallström’s The Shipping News, from a screenplay by Robert Nelson Jacobs, based on the novel by E. Annie Proulx, has received very mixed reviews since its release. But long before then it had become the victim of a persistent “buzz” in the trade papers, the gossip columns and on the Internet—so much so, apparently, that the picture has been dismissed as a mess, Mr. Hallström wound up in the hospital before he could sign off on a final edit, and six minutes of the film were cut after the first screening.

I am baffled by all the negativity surrounding it, and I am prepared to designate it as the most underrated film of 2001. I am surprised also that Kevin Spacey has been widely branded as miscast and ineffective in the lyrically submerged role of a congenital loser named Quoyle, whose tangled roots drive him back to Newfoundland after a series of disasters that occur while he is working as an ink-setter for a newspaper in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

Since I can’t imagine any other actor in such a nebbish role being half as effective as Mr. Spacey, I can only urge my readers to rush off to this singularly stirring entertainment before it disappears from view. However, if you do plan to see The Shipping News, you may not want to read any further in this review until after you have seen the movie’s jolts, surprises and epiphanies for yourself.

The movie begins with what I can only describe as a lyrical linkage between Quoyle, the ever-drowning, water-hating child, and Quoyle, the still-drowning adult. The child has been thrown off his father’s dock as a “tough love” way of teaching the boy to swim. As the boy gazes helplessly up from the depths, his face dissolves into that of the grown-up Quoyle still drowning, metaphorically, in the sea of existence. We realize instantly that he has not done very much with his life, and his life has not done very much with him. Mr. Hallström and his collaborators have thus established a character and life pattern in record time without wallowing in a sea of behavioral mediocrity. We see Quoyle at his unrewarding post, by a circulating machine we have seen so many times spewing out newspapers with melodramatic headlines. Here the presses are de-dramatized as we see everything from Quoyle’s point of view.

Things change very rapidly when a voracious female named Petal (Cate Blanchett) invades Quoyle’s life and barely gives him a chance to breathe before she has bedded him, married him and presented him with a little girl named Bunny, whom Quoyle cares for dutifully while Petal is out carousing with other men, and not just out. On occasion, she brings her lovers right into the house, and keeps complaining to her husband about how boring he is. It is hard for an actor or a character to keep his dignity in this situation, particularly in these macho times for many movie going tastes.

Still, the story keeps getting more outrageous than life, especially after Quoyle receives a telephone call from his father telling him that he and Quoyle’s mother are about to commit joint suicide, and want Quoyle to make the funeral arrangements. It is about this time that Petal runs off with her current lover and takes Bunny with her. Curiously, Bunny has always loved Petal despite, or perhaps because of, her excesses. Nonetheless, Quoyle persists in believing that Petal and Bunny will return, a belief that transcends stupidity into becoming a kind of heroism. The police arrive at his door to tell him that Petal and her lover have died in an automobile accident. Bunny is safe, however, because Petal sold her for $6,000 before she embarked on her fatal trip. The irony is that Bunny continues to love Petal, and for a long time refuses to believe that she is dead.

It is in the midst of these catastrophes that Quoyle’s Aunt Agile (Judi Dench) arrives at his doorstep to claim the ashes of her brother, Quoyle’s father. She then persuades Quoyle to start a new life with Bunny in their “ancestral” home in Newfoundland, actually a ramshackle house precariously anchored on an ocean-side cliff. When Quoyle first sees the house, he cannot believe that he and Bunny and Aunt Agile can possibly live in this wreck of a dwelling. But Aunt Agile persists, and Quoyle and Bunny bunk down for a new life.

Quoyle applies for a job at the local newspaper with only his ink-setting position in Poughkeepsie to recommend him. He is immediately recruited as a reporter by the managing editor, Tert Card (Pete Postlethwaite). Quoyle’s job is to report the shipping news, picayune as it is in this small fishing port. The paper’s owner, Jack Buggit (Scott Glenn), gives Quoyle his most valuable lessons in magnifying a routine story into a journalistic coup. But to succeed, Quoyle must overcome his understandable lifelong aversion to water.

As Quoyle gains confidence about his place in the picturesque town of Killick-Claw, he takes the initiative in courting a local widow, Wavey Prowse (Julianne Moore), and her retarded son, Harry (Will McAllister). Wavey tends to look more kindly on Quoyle when Bunny becomes the only child ever to bond with Henry. But Wavey is no pushover, and Quoyle discovers he has to go deeper into his feelings than he has ever gone before to land Wavey, who has her own secret about her husband. Despite its seeming quaintness, Killick-Claw is the repository of many cruel secrets, all of which are revealed by the final fade-out, though not without some initial puzzlement.

When Aunt Agile enters the family’s outhouse to pour her brother’s ashes down the hole, and then proceeds to defecate on his last remains, it is not until much later that we and Quoyle discover that Aunt Agile is simply avenging an old wrong. So much becomes clear about Quoyle’s father, and, in the process, Quoyle begins healing his own wounds as he starts his new life.

There has been a lot of talk about this movie or that being faithful to this book or that. Ms. Proulx has stated that she is quite pleased with the adaptation of her much admired novel. But even if it could be demonstrated that the filmmakers did not dot every i and cross every t in transferring a prose work into a film, I would argue that a film stands or falls on its own merits as film irrespective of its literary source. It may therefore be possible to imagine a stronger and tighter film than this version of The Shipping News, but I am inclined these days to embrace positives rather than hold out for ultimates.

There is more than a little humor, dark as it may be, in this version of The Shipping News. Mr. Spacey’s Quoyle pops up unexpectedly from time to time with comments that are witty and pithy—some in headline form—and I find that sign of complexity interesting in a character who is otherwise a candidate for total condescension. Julianne Moore projects warmth as Wavey, and it is welcome in a film that without her could be as cold emotionally as it is climactically. In a very small part, Cate Blanchett displays an amazing versatility in humanizing a preposterous character like Petal. And what can one say about Judi Dench that has not been said over and over again forever and forever?

If I had to encapsulate the movie in two scenes, I would begin with the frenzied spectacle of Bunny hammering away homicidally at her doll because she found it “boring,” a quality she fears her mother Petal found in her to cause her to abandon her. When Quoyle, witnessing Bunny’s rage, tells Wavey that Bunny worries him when she beats the brains out of her doll, Wavey calmly observes that the doll is a toy, not a person, and Quoyle shouldn’t worry. I found Wavey’s attitude very wise and compassionate. I have no idea where the idea for these scenes came from: the book, the screenplay, the director or all three, but they are typical of all the small moments that eventually coalesce into an expansive celebration of several repaired psyches. It is good also to see Scott Glenn and Pete Postlethwaite supplying more than their share of local atmosphere.

Thanks to Marla

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