It's an end-of-month archival expansion, and this only slightly redacted review of The Shipping News, from its theatrical bow in 2001, is now being added to the rolls. To wit:



You can envision the attractively packaged DVD sell-through collection now: “Lasse Hallstrom’s Baldly Oscar-Baiting Literary Adaptations. Buy it today!” First there was The Cider House Rules, then Chocolat, and now The Shipping News, the director’s cinematic tackling of E. Annie Proulx’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. Well acted, technically proficient, warmly photographed — these movies are becoming a holiday rite of passage.

But my problem with all of these films is that while they each achieve a surface hold, they still feel like genteel, dewy-eyed picture books, in this case a J. Crew catalog come to life. They course with humanity, even sometimes quite interesting characters, but trade in little more than obvious emotions and subterranean motivations.

Quoyle (Kevin Spacey) is a punching bag of a man whose hell-on-wheels wife Petal Bear (Cate Blanchett) doesn’t even bother to conceal her flagrant cheating. Hey flamboyant demise, combined with the passing of another relative and the arrival of Quoyle’s long-lost aunt Agnis (Judi Dench) leads the aforementioned adults, along with daughter Bunny in tow, to their ancestral home of Newfoundland.

There Quoyle lands a job at the Gammy Bird, the local paper, covering auto wrecks and, yes, the shipping news. He makes friends with his odd bird co-workers (Notting Hill’s Rhys Ifans and Gordon Pinsent) but bumps heads with the caretaker editor (Pete Postlethwaite), a power-hungry passive-aggressive jerk who runs things for an oft-absent publisher (Scott Glenn). Eventually, though, the responsibilities of his job — which he grows to enjoy — along with the casual, halting courtship of single mother Wavey Prowse (Julianne Moore), nudge Quoyle toward a more proactive life.

The movie condenses and abandons a few of the novel’s darker elements (gone are Quoyle’s second daughter, as well as Petal Bear’s original, even grimmer abandonment of Bunny), and while these changes by and large work they fundamentally change the nature of the story. I get that it’s a sort of paean to small town community, and Hallstrom has an undeniable knack for these types of stories, but with The Cider House Rules, Chocolat and now The Shipping News, it’s also apparent that Hallstrom detests the possibility of naked human conflict; all three movies exist in sleepy subtext, subtext that Hallstrom refuses to drag out into the light of day. (Miramax, R, 111 mins.)