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Shipping News, The
Mixed or average reviews
Based on 31 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 7 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Drama
Written by:
E. Annie Proulx (novel)
Robert Nelson Jacobs
Directed by: Lasse Hallström
Release Date:
Theatrical: December 25, 2001
DVD: June 18, 2002
Running Time: 111 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for some language, sexuality and disturbing images
Starring Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, Judi Dench, Scott Glenn, Rhys Ifans, Pete Postlethwaite, and Cate Blanchett
Based on E. Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, the story traces one man's extraordinary journey to self-discovery when he returns to his ancestral home on the coast of Newfoundland. (Miramax Films)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: An Unfinished Life Casanova Chocolat The Cider House Rules The Hoax
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
In a time when even the best of big Hollywood movies all seem to be mired in a certain nagging, unimaginative visual sameness, this one dares to take us to a place we haven't been before.
Read Full Review >New Times (L.A.) Gregory Weinkauf
Hallström has leavened the story's bleakness with great warmth, fashioning one of the finest films of the year.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Kim Morgan
Stays engaging, chiefly, through the textured, ambiguous performances of Spacey, Moore and Dench.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington
Beside its major virtues, it contains a vice: that one flat lead performance. Who would have thought Kevin Spacey would ever go dull on us?
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Bob Graham
It's hardly possible to overstate what a welcome change of pace The Shipping News is for admirers of Kevin Spacey.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Rita Kempley
It's worth seeing at the very least because it is so different from standard Hollywood fare.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
The choice made by Kevin Spacey in taking on the role of Quoyle in the film adaptation of E. Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Shipping News nearly sinks it. But not quite.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Jay Carr
The Shipping News is good news, but not as good as it could have been.
Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
Despite its haunting artistry and its winning eccentricities, The Shipping News is a vehicle that's still very much at sea.
Read Full Review >Newsweek David Ansen
Has a quiet sense of community, a wry, unsentimental sweetness, that grows on you. It's a patient movie for impatient times.
TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
Everything has a fusty, embalmed quality: Whatever gave the novel its vitality has been smothered.
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
This morbid and self-consciously literary adaptation of E. Annie Proulx's Pulitzer-winning novel is no crowd pleaser.
Read Full Review >Slate David Edelstein
Doesn't really work but has a good cast and great craggy ocean-framed scenery.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
But, lord, the characters are tireless in their peculiarities; it's as if the movie took the most colorful folks in Lake Wobegon, dehydrated them, concentrated the granules, shipped them to Newfoundland, reconstituted them with Molson's and issued them Canadian passports.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Jessica Winter
In lieu of vaporous message-mongering, the languid, episodic narrative -- centering on hapless sadsack Quoyle (Spacey) -- streams along by the gentle force of a convincing melancholic undertow, a dejection and longing that's not so much surmounted as sustained.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
Spacey is endearing, bringing his shy character to life despite glaring psychological gaps in the screenplay.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
Hasn't got quite the right sound as it did in Annie Proulx's novel.
Chicago Reader Lisa Alspector
This atmosphere-heavy drama, with its comfortably quirky characters, elegant performances, and ever shifting tone, is so innocuous it's not worth panning.
Read Full Review >Variety Robert Koehler
Seems to be playing the author's music, but like a string quartet that plays a half-beat off.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Michael Dequina
A passive film, playing it quiet and safe, hoping that the viewer will extend some good will towards it.
Read Full Review >USA Today Claudia Puig
Watching the Pulitzer-prize winning novel by E. Annie Proulx on the big screen is like being on an ocean liner stuck on a glacier.
Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Kevin Spacey's pinched portrayal of Quoyle as a scared palooka rarely transcends its own artifice.
Salon.com Charles Taylor
Spacey mucks up an otherwise pretty and pleasantly vague take on E. Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker David Denby
In the movie's best moments, the misery has a comic lilt to it. [28 Jan 2002, p. 90]
The New York Times Stephen Holden
The final product is soft at the center, a rustic cinematic greeting card.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly John Powers
Spacey is nobody's idea of a goodhearted innocent, and I wonder why nobody has told him he'll blow his career if he keeps trying to pass himself off as Mr. Sensitive. It's time to go back to playing assholes. That's what he's good at, and that's why we love him.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
Awash in hackneyed old-time secrets and hydrophobic metaphor, never consumes us as it should.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
It's a portrayal so unconvincing it makes it close to impossible for the rest of the film to function as intended.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
The language is leaden, the pace glacial and the characters indecipherable. It's easier to read the actors -- they all seem eager to win an Oscar. Fat chance.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 6.1 (out of 10) based on 7 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Pat C. gave it a 6:
Spacey plays a tired, uninspired shell-shocked victim of arrested development fleeing from a life where he dissipates his geriatric energies on substandard slut Blanchett. There are places, when derelicts such as Spacey drop out of sight, where they wash up on some far shore and are never heard of again. For those of you in the market for such a place, check out Newfoundland. The quirkiness of Spacey's new workplace there is merely prelude to the underlying instability in the local population. This is apparent in spades when the personnal history of Moore & Dench's characters refuse to be supressed. Once the credits roll you will be convinced that Newfoundland is of a haunting beauty only every shade of gray found in nature can underscore, and that it is populated by the orphans of an ugly dysfunctional universe. They are of a caliber only slightly larger than the people who vacation there. The place has other perks as well. Unfortunately, Blanchett's character has long dropped off the screen, reaffirming the waste of maladapted lives and, to some irretrievable extent, this film and the overacting of the other characters. It has the right setting, feel and visual splendor of a masterpiece. The most distracting thing is that, like its characters, it obsesses to be one. Makes me want to visit Newfoundland, now that I know how to spot the people I'd avoid.
P. M. gave it an 8:
As I was reading all other ratings of this movie I was disusted to read such ignorance. Obviously these remarks were made by people who have never been to the ROCK! I am a proud Newfoundlander and even though I know virtually nothing about ranking movies, I know what I like and am certainly not ignorant to the rest of the world. And as for Jeremy M. My son, people DO act this way and it wouldn't hurt for you to start acting like a Newfoundlander because you will probably get further. Newfoundland is the best place on this earth to live, not because of prosperity, excellent climate, and long beautiful beaches...but because of the people and the history and way of life. You can't recreate that anywhere, and you cannot just be a newfie...you have to be born into it. And thats makes us, something that no one elese can EVER be. In a related topic, the movie was actually quite good, although Julianne Moore's accent was a bit off. The beauty of Newfoundland is simple, but it takes a special person to appreciate that.
Jeremy M. gave it a 5:
The stuff I liked in the film was drowned out by an consistently annoying group of supporting charecters who relentlessly tried to be as cute as possible. Sorry but real people don't act this way.
Lina C. gave it a 9:
Terrific movie...People who don't appreciate the beauty of this film should start thinking with their hearts... :)
Chad S. gave it a 7:
When Oscar time rolls around and Miramax pulls another "Chocolat," let not your eye-rolling pertain to Cate Blanchett's nomination for her performance as Quoyle's wife, Petal. Her immaculate slut owns the screen like no other character this year. She alone makes The Shipping News worth seeing.
Jere C. gave it a 3:
Another dreary cultural-Left diatribe masquerading as a movie based on an allegedly real story. The occurrence of things like a man being decapitated by his wife, the Judi Dench character "forced" into abortion by rape, the fact of her having been raped to begin with (of course by a handsome normal and wholesome looking young man playing her vicious older brother, certainly not by any member of a certified victims' group such as the homeless, the insane, the Afro-American, the truly criminal element), the crude vileness of the putting of one's alleged tormentor's ashes down the pit of the outhouse before using the place for its normal purpose, all this expresses the maniacal feminism of this dreary director. The Shipping News is no real story. It is an excuse for a toxic feminist masquerading as a cinematic artist to foist on the gullible another anti-male, anti-wholesomeness, anti-normal-morality diatribe, like his (or her) earlier film Chocolat. For success in this purpose, he/she co-opts someone's book, uses the camera most artfully, and shows us some of the most luscious visuals of the year in film.
