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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In "The Shipping News," Kevin Spacey takes tentative little steps, feet turned in, as if he were shackled, or protecting his privates. Walking in this hapless way, he can't get into a boat without flopping over the gunwales. If there's nothing handy to trip over, he goes and finds something -- a rock, maybe -- and then trips over it. He speaks in a disembodied voice just above a whisper, and most of the time he's so tearful and cringing that he seems to have stepped out of the pages of early Dickens. "The Shipping News" is only one of three movies released at the end of the year in which famous actors turned themselves into sad sacks. There was also Jim Carrey, in "The Majestic," playing a dopey screenwriter who gets bonked on the head, suffers amnesia, and winds up in a small town on the California coast; and Sean Penn, in "I Am Sam," as a retarded man who wants to keep custody of his daughter. At the end of every year, pathos gets served up as Oscar bait. By awards time, shame and guilt have created a lump in the collective Hollywood throat: goodness and concern for others will shine forth from...
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