The same problems I had with E. Annie Proulx’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel – an inert main character, an overdone sense of misery – aren’t solved in this adaptation, which stars Kevin Spacey as a dull doormat who starts a new life in his ancestral home of Newfoundland after the death of his poisonously vindictive wife. The movie’s real
accomplishment is the way director Lasse Hallstrom captures the stark beauty of Newfoundland’s cold sea, craggy rocks and beaten-down buildings.
