Rough Waters
THE
SHIPPING NEWS
A literate film of a prize-winning novel misses the boat.
With Kevin Spacey, Judi Dench, Julianne Moore, Pete Postlethwaite,
Scott Glenn
Screenplay by Robert Nelson Jacobs
Based on the novel by E. Annie Proulx
Directed by Lasse Hallström
BY ALL ACCOUNTS - or at least by Annie Proulx’s - the chronically incompetent small-town newspaperman Quoyle is homely enough to crack mirrors. He has "a great damp loaf of a body," with hive-spangled skin, a crenshaw melon for a head, no neck, vacant eyes, and "a freakish shelf that juts from his lower face" and passes for a chin. Oh, and he’s flatulent, no doubt because of his immutable gluttony.
Not exactly the picture of Kevin Spacey who, while definitely neither a Clooney nor a Pitt, surely looks better than something the dog dug up. And yet literary cinema’s top dog, the Swedish director Lasse Hallström, chose Spacey to portray Quoyle in The Shipping News, his tolerable adaptation of Proulx’s 1993 Pulitzer Prize novel that you might generously call a black comedy. His new drama lacks the enchantment of Chocolat or the social relevance of The Cider House Rules to give it an edge. So this time Hallström can only lurch along nobly on the arm of serious intentions.
The stripped-down story of Hallström’s leaner, handsomer, more competent Quoyle opens briefly in upstate New York, where he works as a pressman for a newspaper, and where he chances one day upon Petal Bear (Cate Blanchett), who takes him home (after he buys her a meal) and treats him to a rollicking good mister and misses. Gasping for breath after his supine shagging - Quoyle pretty much talks in a bereft, almost trembling whisper anyway - he can barely eke out a pathetic, "I love you."
And so they marry and have a child, Bunny, who becomes Daddy’s little girl, especially when Mommy turns out to be a cuckolding slattern who brings her boyfriends home to the family roost. When bloody fate intervenes, Quoyle finds himself a single dad. Then his own father calls and leaves a suicide note on his answering machine. And then, knocking at the door, comes Agnis Quoyle (Judi Dench) - the lesbian aunt he never even knew he had - who gets her depressive nephew to move the three remaining Quoyles back to the frozen interior of Newfoundland, where they take up residence in their long-abandoned family estate, a decrepit little house perched precariously on a precipice above an angry lake.
Once there, the Quoyles and the friends they make are naturally ripe for epiphany. Looking for work as a pressman at the local Gammy News, Quoyle gets hired as a reporter by the paper’s cagey absentee publisher (Scott Glenn), who prefers to fish all day. This angers the News’ prickly editor (Pete Postlethwaite) but delights its impish young "international reporter" (Rhys Ifans), who got his job while passing through town one day on his way from Brazil. The publisher hires Quoyle to write the shipping news(i.e. fishing reports) and one highway fatality melodrama a week whether the town has one or not. But the psychologically vanquished Quoyle, who imagines himself talentless and uneducable, turns out to be a beautiful writer who captures the humanity of the town’s lifeblood: boats.
From this scant scenario, Proulx created an exhausting bounty of loneliness and isolation, set against a melancholy landscape of slicing cold, punishing ice and wolfish winds that can literally bring down the house. The people of this great white north are beyond hearty: Some have been known to come back to life at their own wake, and Quoyle’s grandfather left two children behind when he died - at age 12. This sort of wry whimsy, apparently born of too much northern exposure, speckles The Shipping News, although don’t expect to laugh loudly or too often: The movie’s best chuckles breeze by as Quoyle writes mock headlines in head that describe the ruins he sees around him.
One of those ruins is Wavey (Julianne Moore), the single mother of a little boy who didn’t get quite enough oxygen in childbirth, so he’s slow and has few friends until Bunny arrives in town. The love story between Wavey and Quoyle unfolds slowly, like everything else in The Shipping News, whose characters’ anxieties cling to them by linchpins that the right person only need remove to effect a ginger liberation. In fact, Hallström’s entire movie seems to revolve around the inevitable metamorphosis of steadfast despair into a low-keyed resolve that generally resembles happiness. (What else would you call it when the characters speak of making partridgeberry jam?)
Moore, last seen in Hannibal, is less edgy and lachrymose than usual in The Shipping News, and Dench just mostly smiles knowingly at everything that goes on. Spacey, as usual, works his performance to the bone, an approach that plays better in a movie where there’s more going on. He’s a rewarding actor, but also a self-limiting one: He acts with a too-knowing twinkle, adopting a studied approach to his character, holding his tone and posture for most of the movie - and then, he cries, so we know his moment of transformation has finally taken place.