Running time: 111 minutes
Starring: Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, Pete Postlethwaite, Rhys Evans, Scott Glenn
Rating 7 out of 10
Adapting great works of literature for the screen has all too often met with failure, which is why Lasse Hallström's film of E. Annie Proulx's Pullitzer Prize winning novel must be considered a success. The book's deliberate pace, bleak setting and vapid protagonist are hardly ideal source material, but the Swedish director, who has a penchant for unlikely heroes, manages, with the aid of Robert Nelson Jacobs' screenplay, to form The Shipping News into a tender and warm drama which, considering it's set in the frozen tundra of Newfoundland, is quite an achievement. Choosing the normally vital Spacey for the role of the insipid Quoyle, who's known only by his last name, is the epitome of the often ignored principle of casting against type. Spacey succeeds in the difficult task of portraying the pitiful Quoyle without being mawkish. He is backed by an exemplary cast whose characters add more than sufficient colour to compensate for the drabness of his own.
As a young boy, Quoyle is nearly drowned by his cruel father in an effort to teach him to swim. The traumatic experience becomes a recurring vision whenever he finds himself overwhelmed with life, which is often. It also instils in him a morbid fear of water. His tough upbringing leaves him broken to such a degree that by his own admission, "I got used to being invisible". That was "until someone noticed me". Unfortunately that someone was the wild and promiscuous Petal Bear (Cate Blanchett) who jumps into his car and life before eventually departing in an equally abrupt manner taking their six-year-old daughter Bunny with her. The distraught Quoyle's misery is compounded with the news of his parents' suicide.
Into Quoyle's crumbled world arrives his formidable aunt Agnis (Judi Dench), followed shortly by the news that his wife had been killed in a car crash. Reunited with his daughter Bunny and feeling lost, he follows Agnis to the small fishing village in Newfoundland that is the Quoyle ancestral home. Once there, for the first time in his life he finds his name is an asset rather than an insult. It's one of the many discoveries he begins to make about his family. But it's through his unfamiliar role of shipping news correspondent at the local paper and his relationship with the local schoolteacher, Wavey Prowse (Julianne Moore), that Quoyle truly learns about himself.
The Shipping News is a well crafted and gentle film that doesn't indulge in trite romanticism, instead it shows that a harsh life, like harsh surroundings, doesn't have to be void of sunshine.
