Times 022802

The Times of London

February 28, 2002

Film of the week by Barbara Ellen

The Shipping News

One thing to say in favour of Lasse Hallström’s The Shipping News is that it looks achingly beautiful. As one character remarks: “’Tis a place like no other,” and Hallström (What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, The Cider House Rules, Chocolat) and the cinematographer Oliver Stapleton make the most of their Newfoundland location, pitching it perfectly between beauty and brutality, life and death, moodily romantic vistas and shots of extras with bad teeth wearing Fisherman’s Friend jumpers.

We get to feast on the kind of depressive greys, slurry greens and bruised blues that make the sea the feral entity it is at its best (worst). Add to that the white flashes of snow and ice, the omnipresent threat of wind, rumbling so close it seems able to leap out of the screen and straight through you, and an inky black night sky melting into velvety oblivion. It’s all so relaxing, it almost seems a shame to bring in actors. Indeed, if high-grade cinematic wallpaper is what you’re after, then The Shipping News is it.

The good news is that the film is so wonderful looking it would be impossible to hate it. The bad news is that it might be more than possible to sleep through it. We seem to be having a run of “worthy” films at the moment, but this just about takes the ship’s biscuit. Like Chocolat it is a literary endeavour, based on the Pulitzer Prize- winning novel by E. Annie Proulx, and boasts one of those tales so convoluted and elaborate it makes Ulysses read like Popbitch.

Robert Nelson Jacob, the screenwriter, seems to have solved the small problem of complete incomprehensibility by slicing out key characters, important scenes and generally disembowelling the plot. There’s still lots left, though. The Shipping News manages to cover dark and ugly childhoods, secrets, redemption, promiscuity, ghosts from the past, hauntings in the present, drownings, shipwrecks, decapitations, incest, necrophilia and crucifixion. You come away thinking those coastal types might not get out much, but, when they do, they really make it count.

Kevin Spacey plays Quoyle, a slow, slightly simple journalist (how so?), who falls for the inhuman mega-tarty Petal (Cate Blanchett, fulfilling all her Courtney Love fantasies). They have a child, Bunny (one fewer than I recall from the book), but, after attempting to sell her to an adoption agency, Petal is drowned. Quoyle decides to take Bunny (played by the three sisters Alyssa, Kaitlyn and Lauren Gainer) and join his Aunt Agnis (Judi Dench) in resettling in the old Quoyle homestead in Newfoundland.

As befits a family with a diabolical history (Quoyle’s ancestors turn out to be the Mitchell brothers of pirate-era Newfoundland), their house is a gloomy, primitive hellhole, as starkly drawn as a child’s painting and lashed to the ground with rope to stop it blowing away in the wind. We learn that it was dragged there over ice by Quoyle’s ancestors (cue the most astounding and humbling visual of any movie of recent memory). We learn all this from Bunny, who’s judged to be what the locals term “sensitive”, in the same way that Haley Joel Osment was “sensitive” in The Sixth Sense. Only this time, in stead of “I see dead people”, we get the slightly less sensational “I see a man and his dog.”

It’s all very dour (even the seagulls looks suicidal) so Quoyle’s placement at the local rag, the Gammy Bird, provides much needed light relief, as do his co-workers — Scott Glenn as the gruff editor-fisherman, Rhys Ifans’s dapper travelling Englishman and Pete Postlethwaite as the spiteful, toadying deputy editor. Quoyle is sent off to report on the “best” weekly car wreck (which makes him think of Petal), but soon finds his true niche writing about visiting vessels and pining for the “tall woman”, the beautiful, mysterious single mother, Wavey (Julianne Moore), whose husband was said to have been killed at sea.

All of which information, and more, Quoyle drinks in with a quizzical, childlike gaze and an aura of outsider innocence. Which would have worked much better if Bunny did not also have a quizzical, childlike gaze and an aura of outsider innocence. You only really need one pair of eyes and ears in a movie, and here we seem to have at least two jockeying for supremacy. Although, admittedly, going by the number of revelations towards the end, perhaps that was judged necessary.

It eventually transpires that pretty much everyone in The Shipping News seems to have a secret to hide, a tale to tell, a postscript to add, and so on. Ultimately, it becomes exhausting trying to keep up.

Nor do the main performances have much to recommend them. Moore wanders pointlessly around the place with an statement on her face as if she’s forgotten to turn the iron off. Meanwhile, Dench (whose accent is a bit of a shipwreck all by itself) seems to have had a bit too much on of late, and ends up napping with her eyes open through most of her scenes.

Most catastrophically, Spacey is completely miscast as the dim-witted Quoyle. As evidenced by films such as Swimming with Sharks and American Beauty, Spacey exudes malevolent urbanity like no other contemporary actor. However, he does not manage blank victimhood quite so well. In fact, Spacey’s Quoyle is not so much a case of casting against type as of a superb actor casting his talents to the wind.

Which just about sums up the film too. What should have been a bracing cultural breeze, mixing literature and cinema, turns into a hurricane of vague promise, casting misfires and lost opportunities. A bit of a looker, though, if you like them pale, dark and uninteresting.

Thanks to Jan M.