How many shades of gray can possibly fit into one picture? The big-screen adaptation of E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News laboriously ponders that question as it fails to address any others that it raises. The result is another annual Oscar-minded Miramax release that lives up to its pedigree by falling short of saying anything meaningful.
Director Lasse Halstrs
But any possibility for The Shipping News to grip an audience ends at its scenery. The characters never fully develop and the story lumbers on in a soporific haze.
Quoyle (Kevin Spacey) shuffles his feet when he walks and speaks in a barely audible monotone. He has struggled his entire life for respect--a pathos strongly embedded in Proulx's description of her protagonist as a grotesque oaf with "features as bunched as kissed fingertips."
However, Spacey's Quoyle is neither fat nor ugly--physical characteristics required for a convincing portrayal. This is an exceptionally disappointing performance from Spacey, a great actor who seems to have relegated himself to the warm and fuzzy department of Hollywood.
Aside from Spacey, the rest of the cast does a fine job, but they have regrettably little to work with. The Shipping News brings up issues of incest, rape and death, but it seems content to sweep them all under the rug before they become a point for real emotional tension.
Like drowning fishermen, important questions sink to the bottom of the sea, never to resurface. For a movie trying so hard to show the transcendent power of coping with one's history, it is ironic that The Shipping News seems content to hide from these confrontations, lest an audience be forced to wrestle with truly difficult issues.
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