The Shipping News * Dir: Lasse Hallstrom With: Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore, Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, Pete Postlethwaite, Rhys Ifans, Gordon Pinsent, Scott Glenn, Jason Behr, Alyssa Gainer, Kaitlyn Gainer 111 mins, cert 15
With the enthusiastic patronage of formidable Miramax head honcho Harvey Weinstein, director Lasse Hallstrom has come to specialise in cutesy-yet-classy emotional dramas: hardback movies, yet with enough of the airport bestseller about them to keep the celluloid pages turning. They are placed in front of us like dishes in an upscale restaurant, with Hallstrom as the head waiter superciliously telling us: "Enjoy!"
Chocolat cloyed; The Cider House Rules coagulated - but this is something else. Based on the Pulitzer prize-winning novel by E Annie Proulx, it is a profoundly tiresome, unconvincing, formulaic emotional blockbuster with some of the most outrageous accents to be heard in the cinema today.
Kevin Spacey goes into his most deeply irritating holy-innocent mode (to be seen later this year in K-PAX) for the role of Quoyle, a put-upon nobody, exploited by his gum-chewing trailer-trash girlfriend Cate Blanchett, who humiliates him by bringing other men home while he has to stay in another room with their daughter. A tragic sequence of events sees him move with the child to his ancestral home in a little coastal town in Newfoundland, along with his cranky great-aunt Judi Dench, where he gets the quirky job of shipping news reporter on the local newspaper. It is here that he gets on with the business of redemptively falling in love with local woman Julianne Moore, herself a single parent of a son with glasses and a picturesque learning disability.
The movie boasts an extraordinary array of actors who have to do funny voices other than their own: Moore, Dench, Pete Postlewaite, Rhys Ifans - and the rest of the cast who have to do what they imagine to be a Newfoundland accent. Because although the movie never explicitly mentions it, sneakily implying it's a story of smalltown USA, the action happens outside the United States in a foreign country (head of state: Her Majesty the Queen) so we can only assume Mr Quoyle's passport and immigration papers are in order.
Judi Dench does a sort of low-cal Irish brogue. Julianne Moore sounds like she's doing an impression of Sinead Cusack doing an impression of Pierre Trudeau. Ifans, on the other hand, is playing a plummy-voiced Englishman who is implausibly supposed to have arrived en route for New York in his home-made Chinese-style junk. At his farewell party, the locals trash it, because they don't want him to go.
This curious scene is more creepy than heart-warming - which is a paradigm for the film as a whole. As in The Cider House Rules, this movie has an Irving- esque habit of mixing sugary material with stuff like incest, rape, suicide. It all leaves a very strange taste in the mouth, and fails to convince that this slushy tale is anything other than a strident, uninteresting bore.
The Mothman Prophecies *** Dir: Mark Pellington With: Richard Gere, Laura Linney, Will Patton, Debra Messing, Lucinda Jenney, Alan Bates, Nesbitt Blaisdell, Clay Bunting, Dan Callahan, Eric Cazencave 119 mins, cert 12 www.spe.sony.com/movies/mothman
Based like all good tales of the paranormal "on true events", this is the story of John Klein (as opposed to Joe Klein?) played by Richard Gere, a star reporter on the Washington Post, whose wife dies of a brain tumour, tormented by visions of a huge, winged, mothy creature. Two years after her death, Klein is driving at night and somehow finds himself in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, a small town hundreds of miles out of his way where the locals are similarly plagued by mothy appearances, apparently warning of some terrible event - and for reasons personal and professional, Klein resolves to investigate this terrifying phenomenon.
Since The Silence of the Lambs, moths have a residual creepy potential all of their own and Mark Pellington makes an entertaining movie from all this. The stone-faced Gere is more at home here than in a romcom role and there are a few effectively scary moments. But it goes on a good 15 minutes too long, and Alan Bates is given an outrageously hammy role as the regulation haunted priest/expert figure.
The Conversation ***** Dir: Francis Ford Coppola With: Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Frederic Forrest 113 mins, cert PG
After 28 years, Coppola's cerebral classic of paranoia and surveillance still looks outstanding, and more relevant than ever in the age of CCTV. Gene Hackman plays Harry Caul, a private bugging operative engaged by the shadowy chief of an unnamed corporation to listen in on the conversation of a man and woman. This Caul does, using hi-tech techniques to refine and clarify the recording over virtually the entire movie - removing the echoing, whispering, weird buzzing harmonics - so that every enigmatic word is audible.
The resulting tape is the focus of a Kafkaesque tale laden with suspicion and fear, and also becomes a symbol of Caul's own loneliness and inability to form relationships. It is an extraordinary premonition of Watergate - though Lyndon Johnson tape-recorded White House conversations in the 60s, giving Nixon the idea. The plot finally turns on the exact emphasis and intonation of two words on the tape. Audiences are entitled to wonder: could those really be made to sound different through audio glitches? Or did Coppola's sound designer, Walter Murch, cheat by recording two different versions? It doesn't matter. This is a severe and gripping masterpiece.
If . . . **** Dir: Lindsay Anderson With: Malcolm McDowell, David Wood, Richard Warwick, Christine Noonan 111 mins, cert 15
This is the High European classic that is also quintessentially English: Vigo and Godard come to St Trinian's. Lindsay Anderson's soixante-huitard parable of an uprising at a crummy minor public school is riveting in its evocation of the very real, unexaggerated nastiness of this sort of establishment. It's certainly a corrective to any excess Hogwarts nostalgia.
There are brilliant touches, such as having the sub-Etonian "Pop"-style prefects call themselves "whips", like grown-up establishment parliamentary bullies. David Sherwin gives battle-hungry rebel Malcolm McDowell some lovely lines; told by someone that in Calcutta someone dies of starvation every eight minutes, he replies wistfully: "Eight minutes is a long time . . ." The beating scene is horrible - and when McDowell, still smarting from the cane, starts eyeing up the school cadet force's rifle and ammunition stores, things become unbearably tense. I have to say I find the surrealist ending rather flabby and undermining, but this is still a terrific film made with incredible brio.
