C-

It’s becoming a holiday tradition that spreads gloom rather than cheer. No, I’m not talking about the newest treacly adaptation of “A Christmas Carol,” but the seemingly inevitable December release of a Lasse Hallstrom picture, which Miramax, the distributor, will then promote for award consideration. In 1999 it was the inexplicably popular “The Cider House Rules” (for which Michael Caine won a totally undeserved Oscar). Last year came the gooey idiocy of “Chocolat.” Now Hallstrom offers his adaptation of E. Annie Proulx’s prize-winning novel about a sad-sack widower who’s transformed by his move, along with his young daughter, to the small, isolated town on the Newfoundland coast from which his family originally came.

The central character is Quoyle (Kevin Spacey), who’s introduced as a human doormat working as an ink setter at a upstate New York newspaper; an elaborate special effects shot reveals him as a perpetually drowning man, whose fragile state can be explained by the brutality of his father, who dumped him at a tender age into a lake to force him to swim or sink. By chance, however, Quoyle bumps into a floozy with the unlikely name of Petal (Cate Blanchett). Suddenly it’s six years later, and Quoyle and Petal are unaccountably married and have a darling but difficult daughter called Bunny (played by triplets Alyssa, Kaitlyn and Lauren Gainer). Husband and kid both dote on Petal although she treats them like dirt, and eventually she deserts Quoyle, taking Bunny with her. The distraught man is soon confronted by a new calamity: Petal perishes in a car crash along with the guy she was running off with (they dive off a bridge into a river); happily Bunny survives (because Petal has in fact sold her for traveling money). Enter Quoyle’s aunt Agnis Hamm (Judi Dench), a salty old broad who’s come to retrieve her brother’s ashes (as if things weren’t bad enough, Quoyle’s old man has just committed suicide, along with his wife) and return after many decades to the old homestead in Newfoundland. Quoyle and Bunny go with her, and before long they’re renovating the decrepit family house and Quoyle has not only secured a job as a reporter at the little paper owned by gruff fisherman Jack Buggit (Scott Glenn) but gotten romantically involved with a widow named Wavey (Julianne Moore), who has a mentally challenged son named Herry (not Harry, it should be noted, though the tyke looks rather like Harry Potter–he’s played by Will McAllister). Over the course of the next few months Quoyle has to face his own past, his present difficulties and desires, his dark family secrets and his fear of the sea, all on the way to personal redemption and revivification.

As this precis suggests (and rest assured it covers only the first portion of the story–the complications and revelations in the picture’s last hour are even more convoluted), “The Shipping News”–the title refers to the comings and goings of ships, on which Quoyle is to report, along with car crashes–is strenuously soapoperatic, one of those stories that might work decently enough on the printed page (where its narrative contrivances, clumsy symbolism and myriad coincidences can be camouflaged by length and careful prose) but will come across as almost unbearably heavy-handed and implausible when transformed into a two-hour film. Certainly it would take more sensitive people than Hallstrom and scripter Robert Nelson Jacobs (who also adapted “Chocolat”) to invest it with the delicacy and subtlety it would need to be palatable. Their version is the sort of picture in which no need is felt for an explanation as to why a woman like Petal might marry a guy like Quoyle in the first place, or how a house which has been buffeted by wind, rain and snow for forty years could still contain perfectly-preserved family photos on exposed shelves. Even the setting seems false, despite what must have been arduous location shooting in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia: Killick-Claw, the port town where the family moves, is portrayed as a darker, colder Mayberry, filled with colorful eccentrics with names like Tert Card (Pete Postlethwaite), Beaufield Nutbeem (Rhys Ifans), Billy Pretty (Gordon Pinsent) and Bayonet and Silver Melville (Larry Pine and Jeanetta Arnette). When you add these unlikely monikers to Quoyle, Hamm, Petal, Bunny and Buggit, it’s awfully cutesy. Still, things might still have worked if the picture didn’t go completely bonkers in the last half hour. The mood of off-kilter melodrama turns truly gloomy, with revelations about blood-thirsty pirates, child molestation, rape, murder and long-simmering lies about the death of a spouse (speaking of Mayberry, the last-named plot turn even recalls an episode of the old “Andy Griffin” series that guest-starred Stu Erwin; the difference is that in that case, it was supposed to be funny). In addition, the water symbolism gets so strong that the viewer feels positively hammered by it: not only does Quoyle survive a night in the drink to show how he’s overcoming his childhood terrors, but at the close a supposedly drowned character returns to life as the final seal on a message even the densest observer couldn’t help having gotten twenty minutes earlier. (Having Quoyle’s obvious intended named Wavey doesn’t help, either.)

Hallstrom has assembled a large and distinguished cast for the venture, but it’s not used to best advantage. The leads, for instance, are either unsuited to their characters or slide into them entirely too comfortably. Spacey is one of our greatest actors, but he never seems authentic as a halting, hesitant fellow like Quoyle: it’s sort of like Pavarotti singing Gershwin–one might be amazed that he can manage it at all, but you wouldn’t want to listen to it very often. (Having Spacey play such a part worked with Verbal Kint precisely because Keyser Soze was involved, too.) Dench handles the hard-ass broad shtick of Agnis Hamm all too smoothly, while Moore has never seemed more like a mousier version of Sandy Dennis than she does here–her affectations are constantly accentuated rather than mitigated. Postlethwaite, Ifans and Pinsent are little more than a lovable version of the Three Stooges (Pinsent comes off best). Glenn exudes a rough charm in the relatively undemanding part of Bugitt, but Blanchett chews up the scenery far too broadly as the unremittingly unfaithful Petal. Fans of “Roswell” may enjoy seeing Jason Behr as Buggit’s carpenter son; he’s affable in a role that calls for a less serious, dour mien than his television persona.

Technically “The Shipping News” is well put together, with solid cinematography by Oliver Stapleton (working on a difficult location) and a reasonably evocative score from Christopher Young. But their efforts can’t rescue a picture which, in the final analysis, is nothing more than a heavy-handed soap opera masquerading as serious drama; in the end it sinks under the wright of its own pretensions. (This review, incidentally, is based on the version of the film that was screened for critics before Hallstrom decided to do a bit or re-editing prior to the December 25 release. It hasn’t been revealed what the recutting involves, or whether it will result in a print that’s shorter or longer. It’s unlikely, however, to be much different or much improved.)

Grade: C

Muhammad Ali is a fascinating fellow, and Michael Mann a very talented filmmaker. But the latter’s big-budget picture about the former, while made with the careful craftsmanship Mann lavishes on all his projects, is a curiously unsatisfying piece which reveals far less about its subject than you want to know. What’s most surprising about “Ali,” in fact, is just how staid and formulaic it is. Not only does it fail to examine the personal life of the boxer to any great extent, but, apart from a couple of exquisitely recreated boxing matches, its presentation of his public career comes across as fragmentary and disjointed. The picture is cautious, pragmatic, even decorous–the very antithesis of its subject.

To be fair, “Ali” doesn’t pretend to be a full biography of the heavyweight champion. It ignores the first twenty-two years of his life and everything after 1974. It offers instead a chunk–a major chunk, to be sure, but still a chunk–of the story, beginning with the 1964 match in which Cassius Clay, as he was known at the time, shocked the boxing world by defeating Sonny Liston and concluding with the Don King-promoted “Rumble in the Jungle,” the highly-touted extravaganza in Zaire in which Ali regained the crown of which he’d been stripped by winning over the favored George Foreman. Between these two pivotal events, the picture covers the fighter’s first two marriages and his introduction to his third wife, his conversion to the brand of Islam preached by Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, his conviction for refusing induction into the army and subsequent appeals, and his struggle to reclaim the title after being denuded of it by boxing authorities. The decade was certainly the central one in Ali’s life, and it does impose a certain dramatic symmetry on Mann’s film, with the two major fights acting as bookends; but unfortunately the decision to concentrate exclusively on it leaves the roots of Ali’s character unexplored and the tragic aspects of his life over the past twenty-seven years untouched. Moreover, the picture doesn’t even manage to treat the ten years it does cover very satisfactorily. To often it comes across as history hastily written in shorthand–“Now Malcolm X is assassinated! Now Martin Luther King is shot!”–and there’s a clunky, one-thing-after-another quality to it all that seems more appropriate to the TV screen; at one point sportscaster Howard Cosell (played by Jon Voight) is even made to explain to Ali, in the simplest possible terms, why the government is persecuting him–it’s as though the audience (as well as the title character) are being spoon-fed the most elementary information. The portrait of Zaire under Mobutu in the final reel, moreover, seems simplistic after the far deeper and more effective depiction in the recent “Lumumba.” One hates to bring up Oliver Stone’s hysterically conspiratorial treatments of modern events for comparison, but whatever their faults–and they are considerable–“JFK” and “Nixon” demonstrate a mind selecting and arranging material to some dramatic point–a characteristic that’s distinctly lacking here. Most of the characters, too, have a sketchy feel to them. Ron Silver, to offer one example, is made up to look astonishingly like Angelo Dundee, Ali’s famous trainer, but he’s given virtually nothing to do except to hover in the background. The talented Giancarlo Esposito is so anonymous as the fighter’s father that for a time it’s not even clear whom he’s playing. Ali’s friendship with Malcolm X is an important plot element early on, but Mario Van Peebles makes little of the role, and as Elijah Muhammad Albert Hall is a feeble replacement for the superb Al Freeman, Jr. (in “Malcolm X”). And while Jamie Foxx works to bring the drug-addled “Bundini” Brown to life, his is a performance of obvious tricks rather than real conviction. Other good actors–Jeffrey Wright, Mykelti Williamson, Joe Morton–are pretty much lost in the shuffle.

All this doesn’t mean that “Ali” is without virtues. The fight sequences are very well staged, though they lack the raw intensity of, say, “Raging Bull.” Will Smith, though he doesn’t possess the physique of a prizefighter, gets Ali’s voice and enthusiastic attitude right; it may be more an impersonation than a performance, but at least it has energy. And Voight puts his flair for vocal mimicry, exhibited earlier this year in “Pearl Harbor,” to good use as Cosell. He’s virtually unrecognizable under the makeup, which is so heavy that facially he resembles a mannikin more than a human being (it really does inhibit his ability to show emotion), but his periodic banter with Smith’s Ali provides some of the very few moments which seem vibrant and authentic. Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography should also be noted; with its periodic hand-held moments, it manages a mixture of grittiness and gloss which suits Mann’s approach beautifully.

As a whole, however, “Ali” is an ambitious endeavor whose emphasis on surface sheen renders it dramatically bloodless. One can admire the intent of the story arc in presenting this decade of the boxer’s life as his journey of self-realization from Clay to Ali and from America to Africa, but the picture’s failure to delve very deeply into his psyche leaves it overly schematic, more hagiography than history.