The Shipping News

Director: Lasse Halstrom
Starring: Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore

The Shipping News is one of those weird books that I can never believe achieved the success that they got. It is densely, almost impenetrably written, closely plotted and as unlike the latest Tom Clancy as it is possible to be. It one of those unlikely bestsellers that - presumably - hundreds of thousands of people buy, and then leave around, unread, believing that purchasing it is somehow required, and simple ownership implies intelligence. That said, it is a hard book to get into, and the inner journey the main character completes is more important than the plot, which to my mind at least, was almost non existent.

Um. I've found a long way of saying art novel. As art novels go, it is a very good one indeed. As novels generally go, on the surface, it looks like a particularly hard one to film.

Think about making a two hour feature film of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and you will know exactly what I mean.

So. A film of The Shipping News does not bode well for someone who has read the book. All the beauty of language would be gone. The mind set would be gone. All that would be left would be the story, and I think most people who have read the book don't actually notice the story much when they are reading it. Then, the film stars Kevin Spacey. Mr Spacey is not physically like the main character in the book, at all. Danny DeVito as Gandalf would be an example. I was not expecting a good film when I went. I wasn't exactly expecting garbage, but I wasn't expecting good.

I saw The Shipping News with two people. One had read the book. One had not. So, two of us knew what was going to happen, and one didn't. I sat in the middle and occasionally took a peek at how they were taking the film. The one who had read it was simply smiling, lost in the film. She had obviously decided that she trusted the director and the script. The other was smiling and completely lost. She had no idea where the story was going and was enjoying herself immensely. I was somewhere between the two. I knew where the story was going but kept being distracted by two main things. Firstly, I couldn't believe that the story had been extracted as cleanly and as effectively from the book as it had been. Frankly, sitting thinking "This is a brilliant script" takes some getting used to. If you read and go to the movies, then you know what I mean.

The second thing that distracted me was Kevin Spacey. As I have said before he is physically so unlike the character in the book that I sat down expecting a very odd experience. Well, I got my odd experience, but not in the way that I expected. He is brilliant. This is not just a good performance, it is a magnificent one. He (and the director) have extracted the specifics of the character and presented them clearly, but they have also elevated Quoyle from being an individual into being an everyman - a complete and cohesive symbol.

This is not to say that Quoyle now becomes some bollocks muttering Hanks clone next to a symbolic baseball pitch. The idea behind the main character now runs deeper. Quoyle, in the book, was a man looking for peace. A personal individual peace. The medium of film and the director fundamentally change this. Somehow in the film Quoyle's search for peace touches the very essence of the idea of peace itself, as inexpressible as that idea actually is. His search becomes a search that one can identify with on an individual level, as opposed to one that the reader can merely witness and think about. That he laughs when he discovers his truth is one of the most astonishing moments I can ever remember in my memory of literally thousands of films.

I have no difficulty in admitting that The Shipping News moved me to tears at the end. But they weren't the tears in response to personal hardship or lost love. They were the tears that come when someone says something so utterly true, that it can never be expressed in the same way again. I have no hesitation in saying that this film is one of the best of the year and, after I see it a few more times, probably one of the best I have ever seen. Max stars.

(C)opyright Alex Rieneck, 2002.