Review: Slow-moving 'Shipping News'

By Paul Clinton
CNN Reviewer

(CNN) -- Set in the windblown and forbidding landscape of Newfoundland, "The Shipping News" is as cold and removed as its location. Based on Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, and brought to the screen by director Lasse Hallstrom ["Chocolat" (2000) and "The Cider House Rules" (1999)], this slow-moving -- and at times downright bleak -- film nevertheless features a number of excellent performances.

Kevin Spacey stars as Quoyle (the Old English spelling for a coil of rope), a man who has misplaced his soul. Once again, in what's becoming his specialty, Spacey plays an ordinary man at a crossroad in his life. After a life of abuse from his father, and later his wife, Petal (Cate Blanchett), Quoyle finds himself at loose ends after his parents commit suicide and Petal is killed in a car accident while running off with another man. Quoyle is left with their young daughter, Bunny (played by identical triplets Alyssa, Kaitlyn and Lauren Gainer), and his dead-end job as a printer for a newspaper in a small town in upstate New York.

In sweeps his long-lost aunt, Agnis Hamm (Judi Dench). She's actually there to steal her brother's ashes, but ends up staying to help Quoyle and Bunny through their initial grief. Finally, she persuades Quoyle to return with her to their ancestral home, a small fishing village on the coast of Newfoundland.

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They hope to build a future on the foundations of their past, but there are deep secrets buried there. Secrets that effect not only Quoyle, but Agnis, too. The family home, deserted for years, is an old structure tied down to the rocks on a high cliff overlooking the gray, cold sea below. It's in this unlikeliest of places that Quoyle finds a second chance -- and a reason to reclaim his life and soul.

Hallstrom likes stories about renewal, and he loves characters searching for their own truths, as well as emotional subtleties and deep empathy for the defenseless. "Shipping News" fits the bill on all counts. Empathy is here in abundance, and his film is so subtle, it barely moves at times.

Infusing some life is Julianne Moore as Wavey Prowse, a local schoolteacher and mother of a mentally disabled son. She and Quoyle warily circle each other as they slowly reveal their secrets and their personal pain, and she becomes the focal point for his eventual transformation.

Scott Glenn is excellent as Jack Buggit, a local fisherman who also owns the town's only newspaper, "The Gammy Bird," where Quoyle reports on the shipping news. Also working at the paper is Quoyle's nemesis, Tert Card, portrayed by one of the world's best character actors, Pete Postlethwaite. Dench is once again a vital and pivotal part of this film, as she was in her last Hallstrom outing, "Chocolat."

Screenwriter Robert Nelson Jacobs (Oscar-nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay for "Chocolat") had a daunting task in taking "The Shipping News" from page to screen. Jacobs is fairly true to the spirit of the book, although he did eliminate several of the novel's subplots, along with one of Quoyle's daughters (in the book, he has two). Jacobs and Hallstrom are a little heavy-handed with the metaphors, using images of water over and over again. Yes, Quoyle's drowning in his past and must resurface to find a new life. WE GET IT.

Stark, brooding -- and sometimes comical -- this chronicle of how a man reconciles his past with his present, while embracing the future, is slow and ponderous. But the acting is first-rate, and deeply moving at times. However, it takes the patience of Job to get to the end.

"The Shipping News" opens limited on Christmas Day and wide on January 4, 2002. It's rated R.