I sort of liked this movie but two major factors keep me from making a wholehearted endorsement. First, Kevin Spacey is a very good actor but he’s settled too much into playing the same character in movie after movie; where is the successor to Verbal Kint from The Usual Suspects or John Doe from Se7en? Second, Lasse Hallstrom’s direction seems heavy handed here, as if he instructed the cast to mirror the wintry torpor in their movements and emotions.
The Shipping News is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by E. Annie Proulx and set, mainly, during a few winter months in a small coastal town in Nova Scotia. Spacey plays R.G. Quoyle (though throughout the film he is always called Quoyle by the others and I only got the R.G. from IMDB), a hapless loser, hated by his father, used and then abandoned by his amazingly slutty wife, and generally so picked on by life that he’s meeker than a mouse. Perhaps, then, a more extreme example but essentially the same character he played in American Beauty, Pay It Forward, and K-PAX. Spacey does a fine job, as one would expect, but has gone to this well at least once too often: man goes through a mid-life crisis that’s closer to a coming of age trial twenty years later than he should have.
Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog, Cider House Rules, Chocolat) does have a mastery of lush winterscapes and small town life. Where he found pockets of passion and energy in Chocolat and a truly naife-to-man transformation in Cider House, Shipping News loses too much of what was probably much more subtle and sophisticated inner growth in Proulx’s novel. I just didn’t see sufficient action on the screen to justify Quoyle’s growth. Tobey Maguire had Michael Caine as both mentor and antagonist and Juliette Binoche had true magic, her daughter, and the charming antagonism of Alfred Molina. Robert Nelson Jacobs’ script gives us the older reporter Billy Pretty as somewhat of a mentor and Cate Blanchett as the treacherous wife, yet neither goes far enough, while Julianne Moore as Spacey’s true love is simply not significantly passionate, and this all adds up to not enough spark.
Yet Spacey is still Spacey, one of the top actors of this generation–Gregory Peck to Tom Hank’s Jimmy Stewart–so he makes the most of the script. Hallstrom, a Swede, has the ability to bring the winter landscape to life, a participant in the movie. Scott Glenn is terrific as the newspaper publisher and Blanchett is just…hot as the thong wearing slut.
Semi-recommended
BillSaysThis 