When Robert Nelson Jacobs adapted Joanne Harris' obscure novel Chocolat for the screen, an adaptation for which he
earned an Oscar nomination, he moved the story back four decades to the 1950s and turned one of the main characters, an
autocratic priest, into an aristocratic mayor.
But the Hollywood screenwriter knew he could take fewer liberties with a book as loved and lauded as The Shipping News. Published in 1993, the novel had won Annie Proulx a National Book Award and a Pulitzer as well as the Irish Times International Fiction Prize.
"There were four other previous writers on the project before I was hired," says Jacobs on the phone from California, "but (director) Lasse Hallström felt there was no draft that felt like a coherent whole and tonally lived up to the promise of the book. He felt we had to find a cohesive voice, to figure out how to honour the spirit of the book without being slavish to the letter."
Among the alterations: the clumsy Quoyle is not a small town newspaperman at the outset, but a printer who learns to be a journalist only after he arrives in Newfoundland; he has not two little daughters, Bunny and Sunshine, but one; his aunt Agnis has more of a past than in the book; and the romance between the wounded widower Quoyle and the equally damaged Wavey — left rather vague in the book — is heated up by several degrees. Partridge, Quoyle's mentor in Mockingburg, N.Y., at the start of the tale, has been dropped and Petal, the promiscuous wife who sells their little girls to a maker of porn films in the book, merely deals with a dicey adoption agency in the movie.
Proulx had not asked for script approval, never visited the set, and did not see the finished product until a screening in Los Angeles two weeks ago, according to Jacobs.
"I didn't actually meet her until she came to L.A. for the premiere," says Jacobs, who has never been in Newfoundland. "I was so thrilled and very relieved that she liked it a lot. She completely accepted that you had to make pretty big changes. You don't want the movie to be the Cliff Notes for the book but to create a wholly different animal."
Readers who enjoyed the book, which is about to be reissued with a film tie-in cover, will have a chance to judge the adaptation tonight when The Shipping News, starring Kevin Spacey as Quoyle, Julianne Moore as Wavey, Cate Blanchett as Petal, and Dame Judi Dench as the aunt receives its first Toronto showing at a benefit for PEN Canada at the Eglinton Cinema at 8 p.m. Tickets are $25 and are available from Ticketmaster (416-870-8000). It opens in general release Christmas Day.
"We wanted Quoyle to grow and develop in the film and his becoming a newspaperman rather than already being one was part of that," explains Jacobs. "The decision about dropping one of the little daughters was made early. In screenwriting you have [to] compress, to make one character do the work of two. One daughter is enough to show Quoyle in his role as a parent. Petal was more grotesque but you can get away with more grotesque characters in a book. In the movie her awfulness would have compromised the character of Quoyle because he's in love with her. She's still bad in the film but not so evil as in the book."
Another change is in Quoyle's relationship with his aunt, the Judi Dench character, says Jacobs: "She reveals that there has been love in her life, she reveals her own history and encourages him to grow and connect with life; that was not in the book in that form.
"The other thing we played up was the supernatural aspect, Bunny's prescience (she dreams that their seaside house was blown away in a storm), the haunted house nature of the story. There was a lot of discussion about whether the house was needed and Lasse was very clear that it was needed, although it presented technical challenges. Some of the images of the house were computer generated."
Gordon Pinsent, the only genuine Newfoundlander in the cast, plays a memorable character who is quite different from his namesake in the book, an elderly bachelor in the office of The Gammy Bird, who edits the home news page, filled with crafts, recipes and gossip. "Billy Pretty does the job of Partridge in his relationship with Quoyle. Partridge was his mentor but we didn't have time to linger in New York for very long so we combined Partridge with Billy Pretty," according to Jacobs.
Pinsent, who will be introducing the film at the Eglinton tonight, says he was something of a resource for the other cast members trying to master the Newfoundland dialect. .
"They did have a dialect coach who was not from Newfoundland; she was excellent though, she had incredible range of accents. Judi Dench grabbed me by the wrist and said `Oh, I want to get to know you ... you're going to help me.' Julianne Moore sent word to my trailer she would give anything if I could come over. I helped when I could."
Pinsent is aware that Canadian audiences might find the film's portrayal of Newfoundlanders too quaint by half. "I guessed there'd be some controversy. But people outside Canada will look at it differently. Most audience[s] won't say, `it doesn't sound authentic to us.' The movie will set its own rules."
Proulx, who lives in a tiny village in Vermont and is of Quebecois ancestry, is not giving interviews. But through her agent Liz Darhansoff in New York, she issued this statement: "Virtuoso acting, intelligent attention to detail, the stark and powerful landscape make the brilliant and unusual film that I didn't dream could be made."
Thanks to Mike Kennedy for sending me this article which appeared on The Star (Toronto) Website on December 17, 2001.