Shipping news fails to deliver

There are some movies that attempt to say something and succeed. Others, built purely for entertainment, don't go beyond explosions and sex. And there are some films that try to make a statement on the human condition but fail. The Shipping News falls into this last category. The movie, based on E. Annie Proulx's 1994 novel and directed by Lasse Hallstrom, is an attempted treatment of loneliness and resigned impotence, of the power of changing routines and falling in love again and of coming to terms with a horrible ancestry and making more of oneself. But it doesn't quite bring its full potential to bear on these themes because of the uncommitted screenwriting by Robert Nelson Jacobs. The writing doesn't let the characters be fully committed to their roles, so the audience is left unable to give itself to the movie as a whole. What results is an incomplete attempt at insight where the potential lay for depth and feeling. The film begins when Quoyle (Kevin Spacey) moves to Newfoundland with his aunt, Agnis Hamm (Judi Dench) and daughter, Bunny (Alyssa, Kaitlyn and Lauren Gainer). Quoyle is a man lonely and emotionally beaten after his adulterous wife, Petal Bear (Cate Blanchett), died in a car crash. The accident is the first of several horrible events depicted by the movie that lack a certain depth of response and so don't fully convey the sense of tragedy. The fault lies partly with Spacey's, well, spacey and detached acting and partly with Jacobs' incomplete writing. When they arrive in Killick-Claw, a Newfoundland fishing outpost, the audience sees one of the two remarkable aspects of the film -- the depiction of the stark, foreboding and beautiful coastal landscape. The second semi-redeeming aspect of the movie is Hallstrom's success in matching the Newfoundlanders to their cold, windblown land. There is an underlying coldness in many of the town's people, including Quoyle, who finds out that his ancestors in Newfoundland made their living as pirates. Once settled in Newfoundland, Quoyle takes a job as a reporter for the local newspaper and begins to come to terms with his past. Helping him along this way is Wavey Prowse (Julianne Moore) with whom, not surprisingly, he falls in love. Here again rises the problem plaguing the rest of the film. There is little engaging development of the relationship between the characters, and once the relationship is formed, it seems empty - even though the film attempts to portray it as an answer. Rating: C+