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"The Shipping News"
(Reviewed December 9, 2001)
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This was one of those movies (and there are a lot of them) that made me lean over and say, "DEAR GOD, WILL IT EVER END?"
I absolutely hated everything about this mawkish, stupid, incredibly disappointing piece of junk. Kevin Spacey, what the hell happened to your career? What made you think that starring in a
movie this embarrassingly sappy and preposterous was a good move? Didn't you learn your lesson last year from last year's abysmally awful "Pay It Forward," which even the "Touched By An
Angel"-loving American public wasn't thickheaded enough to embrace?
In "The Shipping News," Spacey plays a slow-witted dope who gets treated like a doormat by his cartoonishly ridiculous slut of a wife (Cate Blanchett), then moves to Newfoundland with his
disturbed daughter and a cranky old character of an aunt (Judi Dench) who has Hidden Issues. There, Spacey manages to get work as a reporter at a newspaper, despite not only having no previous
experience at the job but being at least "three bricks shy of a load," as they say. He strikes up a howlingly unbelievable romance with Julianne Moore, the mother of a sweet little retarded boy. Are you
starting to get the picture here? Imagine loading every redeemed-loser, eccentric-character, family-secrets cliche into a garbage compacter, then larding it up with so much artificial sweetener and fermented
schmaltz that it would kill at 20 paces.
Throughout the movie, Spacey very obviously is in overly earnest Master Thespian mode: "LOOK UPON MY PERFORMANCE! SEE ME ACTING LIKE A STUPID PERSON! LO, NOTE MY
HALTING DELIVERY AND CONFUSED, UNCOMPREHENDING EXPRESSIONS!" Yikes! Julianne Moore lapses in and out of Canuck-speak, sometimes sounding accent-free but occasionally laying
on the Bob and Doug Mackenzie act. Dench gives a good performance with very bad material, which is about the best that can be said for anyone involved in this fiasco.
I never watched the TV show "Northern Exposure" because I always had a sneaking suspicion it would be just like this movie: A cut-off northern town full of phony, wacky characters doing
phony, wacky things. This is the kind of movie in which a character invites all his friends to a farewell party, and they end up completely destroying the guy's refurbished boat and his home. As in
"completely destroying." The next morning, the guy shrugs this off as if it is nothing more momentous than a spilled drink on the carpet. In other words, this a movie that not only is stupid, but is one that
treats members of the audience as if they are even more stupid.
The original novel of "The Shipping News" actually managed to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1994, which means that the book must have lost one hell of a lot in the translation from print to screen. Or
maybe the Pulitzer judges that year were Beetlejuice, Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf and Gary the Retard.
This "Ship" is un-see-worthy. (Jesus, I just crack myself up.)
Back Row Grade: F-minus
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