Anyway, I just watched The Shipping News, which is based on an Annie Prolux novel of the same name, and it is the best movie I’ve seen since… Once Upon a Time in America (not that I’m sure how many films I have seen since then). It was on BBC Two. It might not have even registered on my channel scanning, except that I recalled mention of it in one of Randy Smith’s articles in Edge magazine, where he talks about the power its narrative had had on him.

So the story basically focuses on a man, played in the film by Kevin Spacey (who I expect my reader(s) to remember from the superlative Alan Ball film American Beauty) who returns to his ancestral home in Newfoundland after losing his wife. Admittedly this does lead to the somewhat cliched outsider ingratiating himself into a tight-knit, isolated, rural community, meeting the typically eccentric locals scenario. Now this, and the slightly less credible coincidences and events that occur throughout the film, do threaten the plausibility of the plot, and echoed, for me, aspects of Terry Gilliam’s too-weird-for-its-own-good Tideland (though that may be the criticism of someone who’s been flitting between Woolf’s Modernism and Carver’s Realism rather a lot lately), but never threaten to undermine the masterful character development and the sharp, often subtly funny, dialogue.

Speaking of dialogue, the final line of the film, read as a voice-over by Kevin Spacey (much like in another brilliant movie) is perhaps the best I’ve ever heard in terms of plot resolution and simple expression. I shan’t repeat it so as not to spoil it and because it won’t make sense outside the film’s context, but the film is worth seeing just for that line, in my opinion anyway. Perhaps people won’t agree that a single line can make a whole movie, but I feel the same way about the “I’ve seen things you people couldn’t imagine” monologue from Blade Runner, or the stolen On the Waterfront “I coulda been a contender, I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am” monologue from Raging Bull.

Well, that’s about all I have to say on The Shipping News, at this time of night, except that I recommend it, it gets my seal of approval. Now, I’m going to go purchase the novel off Amazon. Good night,

Henry.