The Shipping News

When his wife dies in an accident, Quoyle, who has never managed anything in his life, takes his daughter to Newfoundland, where his family came from. There he starts writing the shipping news for the local paper. The job is listing the boats that come into port; but to get a story in that town he first has to learn his own family's past. The film is not interested in grief. It is interested in a man arriving at his own sentence: at the start Quoyle cannot say anything, and by the end he can write a headline. The change comes not from one event but from the town slowly claiming him. The form is cold and windswept: the Newfoundland coast, a wooden house, the sea. It was largely shot on location and the landscape carries the mood. Lasse Hallström directed, from E. Annie Proulx's Pulitzer-winning novel. The adaptation softens the book's dark humour, and that became the most criticised thing about it. Kevin Spacey plays Quoyle, Julianne Moore the woman in the town, Judi Dench the aunt and Cate Blanchett the dead wife. Who it is for: viewers who like quiet character drama and northern landscape. Who it is not for: readers of the novel. Its hardness is largely smoothed away, and the last section closes on a consolation that is too tidy.