The Shipping News

Rating

Director

Lasse Halstrom

Screenplay

Robert Nelson Jacobs (Novel: E. Annie Proulx)

Length

1h 51m

Starring

Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, Pete Postlethwaite, Scott Glenn, Rhys Ifans, Gordon Pinsent, Jason Behr, Larry Pine, Jeanetta Arnett, Robert Joy

MPAA Rating

R

Review

PREFACE:
In the early 2000s, I was writing reviews for an outfit called Apollo Guide Reviews. That website has since been closed down.

Attempting to reconstruct those reviews has been an exercise in frustration. Having sent them to Apollo Guide via email on a server I no longer have access to (and which probably doesn’t have records going back that far), my only option was to dig through The Wayback Machine to see if I could find them there. Unfortunately, while I found a number of reviews, a handful of them have disappeared into the ether. At this point, almost two decades later, it is rather unlikely that I will find them again.

Luckily, I was able to locate my original review of this particular film. Please note that I was not doing my own editing at the time, Apollo Guide was. As such, there may be more than your standard number of grammatical and spelling errors in this review. In an attempt to preserve what my style had been like back then, I am not re-editing these reviews, which are presented as-is.

REVIEW:
A horrible past haunts two Newfoundland natives who come together as a result of the death of a relative to move into the family home where their own bitterness slowly eats them away.

Kevin Spacey stars as Guy Quoyle, a mentally challenged man whose life takes an unusual turn when he picks up a strung-out Petal (Cate Blanchett) at the side of the road in New England. Together, they have a child, Bunny (Alyssa, Kaitlyn and Lauren Gainer), who becomes a burden for the adultering Petal. When she runs off on Quoyle and is eliminated from the scene, he and Bunny must start a new life without her.

Not long before this, Guy’s father dies, and shortly after his ashes are delivered, Aunt Agnis Hamm (Judi Dench) arrives to say goodbye for the last time. Agnis convinces Guy that it would be best for him to relocate and start a new life. She drags him and Bunny to Newfoundland, where the Quoyles came from. There, the three move into a house held captive on the edge of a cliff by large metal cables.

Guy soon gets a job at the local newspaper where car accidents are the biggest news and he is assigned to the shipping news. When he meets the attractive Wavey (Julianne Moore), Guy immediately falls for her and goes out of his way to begin a relationship with her. The problem is that his previous emotional attachments heavily influence his burgeoning love affair and cause further complications.

Spacey turns in one of his milder performances as the love-starved simpleton. Dench and Moore, on the other hand, give very round, tangible performances with plenty of enthusiasm. While neither are out-of-this-world performances, they show flare and compassion for their characters and adopt an accent far easier than their masculine counterpart does.

The story, based on a novel by E. Annie Proulx, is certainly complex and has some interesting twists near its climax. Screenwriter Robert Nelson Jacobs conveys a tale of lost love and emotional trepidation effectively. The dialogue is a touch clunky, but supports the plot as well as the performances.

While The Shipping News has many good moments, it also has some story-based problems. The movie overuses the ‘mysterious past’ cliché so much that every character seems to have one. It also includes a strange subplot involving a curse the sea has over Jack Buggit (Scott Glenn) and his family. Buggit feels that he must break the curse for his sea-inept son before something bad happens to him. That subplot and one involving the desire of another character to move away from the area are unnecessary and serve only to lengthen the film, not make it more interesting.

The Shipping News is an entertaining movie and keeps its audience involved from beginning to end. It has some unneeded passages and some questionable acting, but director Lasse Halstrom keeps things light enough to surpass those issues.

Review Written

July 8, 2002