Out In The Film Night –Kevin Spacey’s The Shipping News

DVD Review

The Shipping News, Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore

At various times I have been interested to exotic things like Pacific Island cargo cults and the visionary aspects of Native American religious culture around the peyote ceremony and other things in that vein. Practices and rituals done by peoples in isolation from more cluttered and populated areas like say New York City, or even, ah, Buffal. So watching Kevin Spacey going through his paces as a misfit (the classic misfit just the way he drinks in odd-ball acting part if nothing else) going “home” to Newfoundland of all places where a rather quirky set of outlanders await him was intriguing. Along the way he finds a job, a place to be himself (not that boxy job he was running away from, and, of course some love, with earth mother Julianne Moore (hey, this is a feel good movie after all), all things found that make him in the end a normal Newfoundlander (is that the right way to call the inhabitants ?). Like I said a feel good film with lots of nice shot of that forebodingly beautiful land (except I don’t, don’t’ okay, want to live there because getting out appears to be extremely hard). Enough said.