With its sterling literary pedigree, picturesque setting, proven creative team and dream cast, "The Shipping News" ultimately ends up less than the sum of its parts. In adapting E. Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, writer Robert Nelson Jacobs and director Lasse Hallstrm (the team behind "Chocolat") capture an intriguing folk-tale ambiance but have trouble making some of the exaggerated story consistently credible.
The tale starts off awkwardly and has trouble regaining its footing. Kevin Spacey ("K-PAX") stars as Quoyle (pronounced "coil"), an eternal sad sack of a man who passively lumbers through life. After slipping through a variety of jobs, he settles in a newspaper office as an ink setter, which, true to his nature, consists of him looking blankly as the periodicals come rolling by.
These sequences are a little tough to believe because, while dual Oscar-winner Spacey is certainly talented, playing dim bulbs is not his forte. His quick, piercing eyes and his clean, polished diction betray an energetic intelligence inconsistent with the character.
Quoyle's life takes a jolt when his straying wife Petal (played with appropriately cruel vivacity by Cate Blanchett) dies unexpectedly in a car wreck. Quoyle had always carried a torch for her even though it was painfully obvious that for six years she had found him too dull to keep her interest. Rousing the man from his gloom, his long-lost aunt Agnis Hamm (Dame Judi Dench) proposes that Quoyle leave with his daughter Bunny (played by siblings Alyssa, Kaitlyn and Lauren Gainer) and join her in the family's ancestral home in Newfoundland.
While the cold, fog covered landscape seems forbidding and their dwelling is a dilapidated wreck that can barely stand, the move ends up giving Quoyle a drive and curiosity that has escaped him all his life. He gets a job as a writer on the local paper when the staffers mistake him for a seasoned journalist, and he ends up having a surprising aptitude for the task. He starts falling for the enigmatic woman (Julianne Moore) who runs the local daycare.
All of this happens with a series of incidents, part rumor and part history, that make the turn of events less random than they initially appear. As Quoyle learns both the virtues and the curses associated with his past, the tone of "The Shipping News" varies widely. The tall tales that buttress the narrative often undermine the credibility of the rest of the film. One wonders how long Quoyle would have reasonably stayed with Petal because of her blatant lack of affection (when she becomes pregnant she warns him her pregnancy had better not give her stretch marks). There's also a funeral sequence toward the end that requires a viewer to leave cynicism at the door when other sequences progress in a more straightforward manner.
To Hallstrm's credit, the atmosphere of "The Shipping News" is captured vividly. Oliver Stapleton's bleached-out cinematography (he also shot Hallstrm's "The Cider House Rules") gives the landscape a hauntingly austere beauty, and Christopher Young's regionally influenced score is a fitting aural companion to the images. While Spacey's turn is technically solid but a bit off, Dench is suitably hardened, and Moore manages to be both warm and aloof with equal vigor.
None of the participants in "The Shipping News" have any reason for embarrassment. Still, like the tales that support the main story, there's a sense that they sound great but aren't to be believed.
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