Review of The Shipping News (2001) by Steven R — 29 Oct 2007

You'd think a story that includes rape, incest, parental abuse, a fatal car crash, the selling of children, and professional murder as a family tradition, might actually raise your pulse. But Robert Nelson Jacobs' screenplay is so resolutely inoffensive, and Lasse Hallstrom's direction so fatally cautious, that the film struggles to hold your attention for its scant 100 minutes as it skips playfully over all that nasty stuff in hot pursuit of a fairytale ending.

Such an approach worked for these guys in "Chocolat" where the material was souffle-light, but here it's heavier and the superficiality proves fatal. This is supposed to be the story of Quoyle's transformation from exploited loser to self-determined family man with a new vision of life.

But how and why does it happen? Where are the experiences that drive his inner change? What, he cheers up just because someone likes his news stories and he finds a similarly damaged girlfriend? It works in the novel, where we delve more deeply into Quoyle's character and past and come to understand him.

But doing that in a film is more difficult - you can resort to dream sequences and flashbacks as this one does, but it's never really clear what these moments mean to Quoyle. Emergency explanatory voiceover is chopper-lifted in with the camera at the end, just in case you missed the point - and it's highly likely you will have.

Like so many Oscar-hungry films these days, this one makes the mistake of thinking that a brilliant cast, soaring music, and a few lines of pontificating dialogue can hide an empty core. But you can't have light without darkness, you can't have growth without pain - and this film just doesn't have the nerve to go anywhere near either of them.

Compare it with "American Beauty" and you'll see precisely what I mean.