Sydney Morning Herald 

Weekend Ed. Feb 9-10 2002

"Annie get your gun"

Even in a beanie, the urbane Kevin Spacey is too new York for Newfoundland. Sandra Hall reviews "The Shipping News’" much-awaited adaptation.

Looking over the notes I scribbled while watching Lasse Hallstrom’s screen translation of E Annie Proulx’s bestseller, I find the words, "It’s getting better". I wrote them about 20 minutes in. By then, I’d been distracted by Judi Dench from Kevin Spacey’s doomed struggle to shrug off the sophistication he wears like a second skin and lumber along in the outsize shoes of Proulx’s chronically ingenuous hero.

Fans of the novel – and I am one – cite as reasons for its success Proulx’s flair for the anecdotal and the headlong pace of her bitten-down prose. We also know that these are the wrappings. The glue that binds them together is Quoyle (Spacey), the classic ugly duckling – a man without hope until the day his Aunt Agnis Hamm (Dench) walks into his life. Aunt Agnis plucks him out of his dreary existence in a nondescript town in upstate New York and takes off to Killick-Claw, the Newfoundland fishing village where earlier generations of his family spent their lives. And there, against all the odds, he turns into a swan.

It’s also a story that – notwithstanding its Canadian setting – jibes with Americans’ fondest visions of themselves as the proud sons and daughters of pioneers. But in Quoyle’s case, there is a kicker. He’s never been under any illusions about his father, an oaf and a bully. Now he discovers that Quoyle snr was one of the family’s good guys. In Newfoundland, the Quoyle business was plunder. They kept their bodies together (they’d long since dispensed with their souls) by luring ships onto the rocks, looting them of their cargo and killing their crew. Finally, the family’s neighbours could stand them no more and they were driven from the village, towing their saltbox house behind them. It came to rest on the edge of a black cliff, where it still stands, tethered to earth by steel cables to stop the sea winds blowing it away. Here Aunt Agnis expects Quoyle and his young daughter to settle with her, a prospect that first strikes them like wintering in purgatory.

It all suits Hallstrom’s Swedish sensibility down to the ground. His camera takes Newfoundland’s crests, crags and boiling seas in a loving wide-angle embrace and deals just as tenderly with the equally craggy individuals who people the place. Let’s start with Aunt Agnis. Bustling about in shapeless garments, taking everything in her stride no matter how rough the terrain, Dench makes her a dryly endearing figure. She’s also careful not to overdo the bossiness. From Aunt Agnis’ dealings with Quoyle, on a strictly needs-to-know basis, you see her faith in the notion that he’ll eventually sort things out. But first he has to feel free to make a fool of himself.

Hallstrom has been consistently drawn to scripts that evoke a sense of community – "The Cider House Rules" and "Chocolat" are two recent examples – so Killick-Claw’s local paper, "The Gammy Bird", where Quoyle goes to work reporting the shipping news, is located right in his artistic neighbourhood. Certainly the newsroom scenes are among the best in the picture, Scott Glenn slides comfortably into the role of the paper’s owner, Jack Buggit, a rangy, affable, good ol’ boy whose Machiavellian intuitions are so finely honed he can run the office from his fishing boat out in the bay. And Pete Postlethwaite, the British actor of the knuckly cheekbones, makes a sharp foil for him as the quaintly named Tert Card, the managing editor.

All Proulx’s characters are quaintly named. Not her fault, apparently. She claims to have found them all in Newfoundland telephone directories and electoral rolls. In any case, there’s nothing quaint about the disgruntled Card, a figure of sparky malevolence who seems to subsist on a diet of sour grapes. Both Rhys Ifans ("Notting Hill"), and Canadian actor, Gordon Pinsent, as his co-workers Nutbeem and Billy Pretty, enjoy themselves hugely in baiting him. In fact, it’s all so right that Spacey’s wrongness becomes almost poignant. His urbanity and sense of irony are indelibly imprinted in every line of his streetsmart face. Yet here is, trying vainly to discard all that and find innocence again, using nothing more than a woolly beanie and a meek statement.

As for Julianne Moore as Wavey Prowse, the Newfoundlander with whom he gradually falls in love, she doesn’t even try to go native. Admittedly, she isn’t given much opportunity. Proulx describes her as "a tall quiet woman", then works around her. The script adds a few more strokes, among them a sense of humour knowing enough to be called wit. Moore’s natural elegance does the rest. In short, it’s a performance so full of citified flourishes that she and Spacey end up marooned in a conventional romantic sub-plot, which has nothing to do with the rest of the picture.

And, powerful as it is, Cate Blanchett’s cameo as Quoyle’s wife, the diabolical petal, is similarly disconnected. Glittering with malice, she slithers through the first few scenes then dies in a car crash, almost taking the picture with her. It doesn’t get back on track until it’s arrived safely in "The Gammy Bird" newsroom. And even then, we don’t get to see that swan. Try as he might, Spacey just can’t find his water wings.