Customer Reviews

The Shipping News [VHS]

5 star:		(53)
4 star:		(27)
3 star:		(26)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Although many recollect CHOCOLAT as Lass Hallstrom's "classic" film, longtime fans are more likely to connect THE SHIPPING NEWS with his earlier film MY LIFE AS A DOG. Hallstrom has a gift for eliciting excellent performances from children and oddballs living in northern climates. Like Ingmar in the older "foreign" film from Sweden, Quoyle has much to learn about being an adult.

THE SHIPPING NEWS is a beautiful psychological study about the transformation of a damaged man into a whole human being. NEWS reinforces the truth most of us already know -- unconditional love can heal. The most telling line of the story is spoken by Juliette Moore when she says that when she was at her lowest point, the people in her Newfoundland village lifted her up with their love.

I read THE SHIPPING NEWS (which one the Pulitzer) and I laughed until I cried. It is probably the most humorous book I have ever read. I took my husband who had not read the book with me to see the film and he said about 20 minutes into the film, I sure hope this thing gets happier. Those who have read NEWS know that the beginning is a bit sad but Annie Proulx makes Quoyle's travails hysterically funny. There are some funny moments in the film, and the film is quite faithful to the book, but the film is not the book, and it is not quite as funny. Words on the page do not always translate easily to film.

Still, Hallstrom and his multi-talented cast have done a wonderful job which is why I have given the film 5 stars. Judy Dench is clearly "on loan" from her portrayal of Iris Murdock where you can see her in IRIS beginning in mid-January. Her enactment of Quoyle's Aunt Agnes Hamm is quite accurate -- at least she matches the picture I formed in my head when I read NEWS.

Juliette Moore is perfect as Quoyle's love interest. I love Kevin Spacey, but this is not my favorite Spacy role. He definintly plays against type in this film. As Quoyle, his charcter is closer to the fellow he played in THE USUSAL SUSPECTS than the suave con man he plays in LA CONFIDENTIAL, MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF EVIL, SWIMMING WITH SHARKS, or GLEN GARRY GLEN ROSS. If you ONLY like the smart sophisticated Spacy you may be a bit disappointed.

When Spacey won his OSCAR for best actor, he said "Thank you Jack Lemmon where ever you are." You'll find the ghost of Jack Lemmon in THE SHIPPING NEWS.

Rarely does a movie adhere to a book's story as well as Shipping News does to Annie Proulx' sparkling literary masterpiece, a novel about time, place, traditions and love.

The big lump of a main character, Quoyle, a sad, pathetic man (Kevin Spacey) is defined by a metaphor deftly recreated in this film: He cannot swim. As the movie opens, we find that he cannot do much of anything else either.

The inksetter for a Poughkeepsie newspaper drives into a gas station in the pouring rain and witnesses a lovers' quarrel between the driver and passenger in the first car. He doesn't get gas. A split-second courtship instigated by Petal (Cate Blanchett) saddles Quoyle with a disastrous marriage--and his child, Bunny--and ends more disastrously than it began. But Quoyle, lump that he is, unwinds after Petal leaves the picture and his parents die.

Quoyle's Aunt Agnes arrives, ostensibly to pay her respects, but with a caper in mind. Our befuddled man Quoyle leaves with her for his family's dilapidated homestead on Newfoundland's Quoyle point. The house, tied down with steel stays, appears like the ruin of Quoyle's life, and as the story unfolds it becomes clear that the sense of ruin plaguing him may be familial.

But Quoyle surprises viewers and himself as he reclaims his life. Hired to cover car accidents, he earns the respect of the paper's cranky fisherman owner, Jack Buggit, who shocks the staff when he assigns Quoyle a weekly column on the shipping news. Quoyle has no experience, but he his new friends teach him to think in headlines, providing welcome comic relief.

Like parents everywhere, Quoyle finds a friend in another parent, Wavey (Julianne Moore). The friendship takes several interesting turns.

Quoyle is haunted by flashbacks of his own life, and to events that occurred before he was born. The film's triumph, like that of Proulx' book, is in Quoyle's steadfast determination to overcome these seemingly insurmountable odds. The film's Newfoundland (like that in the book) appears dead. But as Quoyle lays the past to rest, both he and the town come to life.

Lasse Hallström aptly directed this film, whose score provides delight on a par with Quoyle's Shipping News headlines. Alyssa A. Lappen

Quoyle (Kevin Spacey) is a middle age man lacking in self esteem who is living a banal and unrewarding existence. One is reminded of Thomas Hobbes' famous aphorism that men often are doomed to endure lives of quiet desperation. He falls in love with Petal Bear (Cate Blanchett) only hours after they meet who does nothing to hide her manipulative dark side. They have a daughter Bunny and this selfish woman proves totally lacking in compassion and loyalty to the both of them. The movie industry has rarely put on the screen a more despicable mother in its entire history. It is regretful that Blanchett will not likely receive an Academy Award nomination for her too short time in this film.

The very promiscuous Petal Bear is ultimately found dead in a car accident with a new boy friend. Quoyle's Aunt Agnis (Judi Dench) entices him and Bunny to move back to their ancestral home located in Newfoundland. This is a part of Canada that the tourists make sure they don't visit. Summertime in May is dreary and the life of the locals indeed echoes the previously cited Hobbes as awful, brutish, and short. Death seems to constantly be lurking in the water and on the treacherously icy roads. People do not aspire to financial affluence, but a life that is barely one step ahead of grinding poverty. The publisher of " The Shipping News" Jack Buggit (admirably performed by Scott Glenn) offers Quoyle a job as a reporter, a position that our protagonist appears totally unqualified to handle. Lo and behold, however, Quoyle admirably grows into his new employment responsibilities and begins the process of evolving into a man of respect and dignity. A mother with a mentally impaired young son drifts into Quoyle's life. Julianne More portrays Wavey in a manner lacking authenticity. Never for a moment does she come across as a woman whose only option is to remain in such an abysmally hopeless environment.

Quoyle eventually finds out that it sometimes might not be best to learn about the past. His family tree is filled with dysfunctional and evil members. Nonetheless, these scenes of Quoyle finding his roots make the film worth while. I have not read the novel "The Shipping News" is based upon. Therefore, I can only speak about what is actually on the screen. This film doesn't deserve a five star rating, but it's sufficiently good that I recommend all Kevin Spacey fans make a point of seeing it. Spacey is one of the premier actors of his era, and by himself virtually guarantees an enjoyable movie going experience. He once again delivers the goods.

From the music, to the accents, to the absolutely beautiful cinematography, this movie had me travelling to Newfoundland from the moment the characters drove toward it.

Kevin Spacey had very little to work with in a character that was written so very internally, and he brought what little light there was to Quoyle right out through his eyes. The man is the king of the smouldering look, and Moore plays her role with a quiet reserve that likewise is carried mostly by gesture, stance, and expression. This is not a verbal movie, not an audio experience in the slightest: this is a visual experience, where body language usually matters much more than not.

Sets, weather, and the ever-present character of the Ocean itself all stir together in this movie. With fade-ins and flashbacks of skill woven into a theme of regeneration and restoration, there is a thread of humour and kindness to this movie that had more than one person in the audience sniffly, myself included.

The daughter had a real screen presence, and is a child actress with skill I think we'll be seeing more often. If the movie itself has any failings, it's that it tried to stay as wide as the novel, and as such, some minor plotlines got nearly no screen time, where they might have been better removed, allowing more time for more central characters (especially that of Aunt Agnis, played by Judi Dench to perfection).

I highly reccommend the movie, most centrally for its beautiful visual scenery, and gentle handling of nonverbal language to portray the emotions involved. The cast of characters managed a story that wasn't spoken, and the impact wasn't lost at all. Newfoundland has never looked so wonderful on the silver screen.

'Nathan

This film is a small, quirky character study with not much plot. This is my favorite kind of movie, but if it's not yours, you may hate this film.

The acting here is all first rate. Kevin Spacey's character is more subdued but less bleak than the one he played in "American Beauty." Quoyle (Spacey) comes into adulthood a beaten-down, invisible lump, but life gives him a daughter to love, a job he becomes good at, a woman he can relate to as a friend (Julianne Moore), a family member (Judi Dench) who is encouraging to him, and a place to belong (Newfoundland). He is not so broken that he can't appreciate all this, so his transformation from lump to human being is believable, not schmaltzy or feel-good miraculous. I particularly enjoyed Quoyle's interior headline-writing as commentary on his life. It added a touch of ironic humor to the film.

Julianne Moore is brilliant and very different than I've seen her before. Here, she is strong, but sensitive and a little scared of another relationship with a man. She and Spacey stumble believably and amusingly in getting to know each other. Her affection for his daughter is an important element in his transformation.

Dench plays Spacey's aunt, one of the supporting characters, and does not dominate on screen as she usually does. This is okay because this is not her story, it's Quoyle's (Spacey's). However, the aunt is important in giving Quoyle a sense of family history and a connection to Newfoundland, where the aunt, Quoyle and his daughter go to live.

Cate Blanchett undoubtedly had fun playing Quoyle's bad girl wife and the mother of his child. She has more range and screen presence than any actress of her generation. Her place in this story is as a harmful influence on Quoyle and his daughter, badly twisting both of their self-images, but her impact is believable and pivotal to their (the father and daughter's) relationship.

The other supporting characters, his daughter and the men at the newspaper office where Quoyle works, are all fine. Rhys Ifans (Hugh Grant's roommate in "Nottinghill") is warm and funny as Quoyle's buddy at the paper.

The scenery of Newfoundland very much controls the mood of the film. It's beautiful, but scary and daunting. So is life. Both can be appreciated and enjoyed if you accept what is and build on that for the future.

It's a wonderful movie. I highly recommend it.

To be honest, I don't think I was expecting all that much at first from "The Shipping News" -- at least not after the week before, when I'd been pretty much wholly underwhelmed by "Vanilla Sky." If anything, I was probably looking forward to the kind of movie that I'd begin to forget about sometime between the walk back to the parking lot and the drive back home, the kind that I could write off to anyone who was interested just by saying, "It was cute." As it happened, though, I got much more than all that from this movie. To me, it felt like ducking into a restaurant alone for a quick bite to eat and getting not only a full meal but a good conversation with the waitress as well.

Of course, that could be the case because the idea of getting more nourishment than bargained for is the motif behind this movie, too. Kevin Spacey plays Quoyle, a simple, marginalized man employed as an inksetter for the local paper in Poughkeepsie. He chances to meet Petal (an eye-opening Cate Blanchett), a somewhat slutty type who usurps, seduces and dupes Quoyle into marrying her. Granted, Quoyle is so blindly faithful that Petal doesn't even bother to disguise her own infidelity -- not even after their daughter, Bunny, is born -- so the time inevitably comes when she leaves both of them behind forever. Thrown into a sputter by losing her, as well as both his parents (to suicide), Quoyle relocates with Bunny to his family's ancestral home in Newfoundland on the advice of his largely unknown aunt Agnis (Judi Dench, strong and steely as always), who visits to collect her brother's ashes for her own special memorial.

There, Quoyle finds that his name is widely known -- and not necessarily for the most glowing reasons, either. Looking for a production job at the paper in his new town, he instead finds himself hired as a reporter -- covering the shipping news, of course, as well as the car accidents -- and begins the long, difficult process of learning to become a journalist. He warms up to Wavey (an alluring and highly enigmatic Julianne Moore), the town's schoolteacher with a mentally deficient son and a lost spouse of her own. And, in general, the movie follows Quoyle as he attempts to build relationships and find a place for himself in a land where the stories and the legends were being told long before he was born.

Now, I haven't read the book by Proulx (although I definitely plan to read it now), but I imagine that it's somewhat of a saga. There are just so many details in this movie that seem collapsed in order to fit within a certain timeframe. Some of them even could have enough substance on their own to fill the central plot lines of other, more Hollywood-styled movies (including a few graphics depictions of death and dismemberment, although those may be deleted for the commercial release). However, here they're presented as mundane, almost everyday occurrences -- a stance that underscores quite effectively the fact that "The Shipping News" isn't a mundane, everyday movie at all. Lasse Hallström doesn't seem to have directed it so much as just to have let it develop naturally from its own rhythms. Kevin Spacey carries the movie awkwardly at first (I just read an interview with him saying that he began working on it days after "K-Pax" wrapped, so that may be why) but comes to blend into his role as effortlessly as everyone else does. The portrayals of the Newfoundlanders also have a concrete sense of time and place: They made me feel like a latecoming stranger in town during the first scenes, but the end of the movie just sneaked up on me like a good acquaintance suddenly saying good-bye. (And given that most of what I know of Newfoundlanders has come from hearing Canadians tell jokes about their violence, stupidity and incestuousness -- which all apparently have a grain of truth, according to this movie -- I felt a certain sense of admiration for them by the time it was over.)

"The Shipping News" is a movie full of hardship, strife and uncertainty, but it's also a movie about the determination to keep certain traditions alive and even to build upon them. Given the social and political upheaval of 2001, I'd recommend it as a humble way to end off a year that most of us would like to forget but obviously never will. But even in a more personal sense, it's a wonderful movie to watch if you've lost a loved one, gotten laid off from work, have had a birthday that only reminds you of the year older or have plowed into any other kind of brick wall that leaves you reeling and not sure what to do next. As Agnis says when Quoyle tells her that he doesn't want to live in the past, "You're not livin' in the past. . . . You're buildin' a future."

Hollywood should take note of that kind of sentiment the next time they green-light a movie script based on a comic book.

I'd never seen Kevin Spacey before I rented this movie. Needless to say, I now find it a little confusing why he hasn't been embraced more. He's brilliant. Another review mentioned that Spacey was against type in this movie. I have no idea what his "type" is but, as incredulous as this may seem to the MTV generation, not being typecast is a GOOD thing. It lets the artist grow, and if this movie is indication, wow, I can't wait to see how Spacey challenges himself in other films.

I've seen Lasse Hallstrom's work before, and knew his work was exemplary. As to the story, I was one of the lucky ones who never read the book and so could not prejudge the film. My main attraction to the film was the great Dame Judi Dench. As a PBS fan, I know her work on the series, "As Time Goes By".

This film shows how desolate living in a land with no trees can be. Quoyle's miserable personal fit right in with the landscape. I was afraid to watch the film, though, and so my first viewing was with the audio commentary. I was shocked to learn the amount of CGI that was used in the film. The house on the rock is only one story high, the rest was computer-generated!

Because of the fair amount of emotion in this film, it's bound to be branded a "chick flick". Such a name should be a badge of honor rather than derision. Work like this is rare and I will support work of this nature with a purchase. I've learned that if I venture out and take the time to explore a movie by an unknown actor I come away with a new respect and understanding for a people I know nothing about. That alone is worth the purchase price.

Is it possible to touch on darn near every human experience in a 111 minute film? One wouldn't think so, but Lasse Halsstrom (director) does so with stunning clarity.

The film is about Quoyle (Kevin Spacey), a man broken apart by an unsatisfying marriage to a [witch] (played excellently by Cate Blanchett). Before the marriage ends, they have a child, Bunny -- who is the highlight of her father's life -- and the mother is killed in a car accident. Coincidentally, Quoyle's "mother" and father were killed very recently, too.

Enter Agnes Quoyle (Judi Dench), Quoyle's "aunt" who's heard about the death of her "nephews" parents and is there when news of the death of Bunny's mother arrives. It is clear from the outset that Agnes doesn't want to hang around, but feels compelled to when she sees her "nephew" fall apart in front of his daughter. She recommends that he and his child come with her to Newfoundland, to discover a new life for themselves....

The trouble is, is that their old life also awaits them in Newfoundland. Agnes is not -- exactly -- as she appears to be, nor is Quoyle's family. Quoyle soon discovers his family lineage: Piracy and wickedness. And he soon finds a new love interest who is just as broken as he is (Julianne Moore).

A curse on their native house in Newfoundland, ghosts, a sixth-sense that some natives have (that comes alive in Quoyle's daughter, too, as the days slip past), homosexuality, incest, murder, family bonds, and a beautifully austere landscape round out much of the story. Didn't I tell you this film had it all? Well...now you'll just have to go and see it for youself! And please do.

A remarkable tribute to film making.

A+ rating.

Annie Proulx, she has a very much endowed vein for fine-intimately spoken humor. Her novel SHIPPING NEWS won the Pulitzer Prize. The Swedish director Lasse Hallström ("The Cider House Rules", "What's eating Gilbert Grape" and "Chocolat") brought it full of genius to screen. It is a MUST to see the scene, where the ancestors of Quoyle (Kevin Spacey) are pulling by rope their house across the ice. The pictures shot on location (Killick-Claw, a Newfoundland harbor town) are simply wonderful. But at first you have to endure the coming in-chapter: a bad life in New York, where Quoyle is overwhelmed by hussy type Petal (Cate Blanchett), a wild, hot-blooded woman, wearing a ton of make-up and short rubber mini-skirts, always looking for excitement with good time guys and honky-tonks, by whom Quoyle has a child, Bunny. Petal soon dies in a car crash with one of her boyfriends, short after Bunny was sold by her to a black-market child adoption ring for six thousand dollars. Moreover Quoyle's parents commit suicide. In this terrible situation (daughter Bunny is found by police) Aunt Agnes Hamm (Judi Dench) appears and Quoyle is convinced by her to move to their ancestral home on the Newfoundland coast. Quoyle takes a job as a reporter for the local newspaper The Gammy Bird and starts to rebuild his life, though the weight of an awful past bears down. Encouraged by the publisher Jack Buggit (Scott Glenn) and by Wavey Prowse (Julianne Moore), the owner of a day care center, Quoyle has to change his loser-life fighting against his demons and the demons of his ancestors. Also Aunt Angie or the "widow" Wavey have their nightmares, but together they get all problems under control. For example the mobbing of an oil-tanker-adoring journalist (Pete Postlethwaite) or getting overboard without a life-belt or losing the house tethered on a storm-wracked cliff during a heavy, cathartic storm. (And at the side there is a romance between Quoyle's daughter Bunny and Moore's son, who suffered brain damage during birth.) Spacey and Moore are wonderful as they, at her lowest point, try to overcome their damaged hearts and love once more. So they all recover from the terrors of their past lives, especially Quoyle's transformation from passive victim into a whole human being is heart-felt. It is good to see films like that, just a shame there is not more.

I had heard and read so many negative reviews of this film that it took me some time to break down and rent the DVD. I am glad I did.
For some time, I've been put off Kevin Spacey who seemed like he was about to make a career in films in which he predominantly "smirked" in a performance, BUT in this film, Spacey shows what a fine actor he can be. As I watched "The Shipping News," I began to realize that what separated me from the negative reviewers was basic and significant: I am not in love with my own cynicism.
The Shipping News as a novel was long and tedious, poetic, yet lacking in tension and dynamic. As a film, it has been dramatized and life breathed into the stories by the excellent actors, screenwriter, and director. As a film, I believe to appreciate it, the viewer has to have been in the shoes and lived some of what the characters have lived through, yet survived. Have you ever felt people ignored you because you were boring? Or shunned you because of something "bad" that happened to you, through no fault of your own? Have you ever hoped for a "second chance" at life? Then you'll identify with this film.
The stark nature of Newfoundland, in all its pitiless weather and beauty, is a rich character in the film, too, so if you think of yourself only as a cosmopolitan city-dweller who believes "country folk" are buffons and simpletons, you'll see nothing to entertain you in The Shipping News. Or if you're the type to whom films are just explosions, special effects, and faked sex, ignore this film. However, if you have something left of a poetic soul, if you still yearn for the hope that the spirit can be healed by adversity and the support of those around you, if you believe that given a little help from friends and your own determination, you CAN build a life for yourself---then see this film.