30 Second Bottom Line: An emotionally damaged man marries a tart, fathers a child and becomes a widow when his wife dies in a car crash with another man. Heartbroken, he and his little girl move to his family's original home in Newfoundland with a long lost aunt. He inadvertently transforms into a successful journalist with a rewarding and rich life.

Story Line: As a child Quoyle (Kevin Spacey) was thrown into the water by his father to teach him how to swim. He almost drowns and is forever scarred. He is in fact so scarred that he lives his life in a ghost-like manner, floating from menial job to menial job, acting dim-witted and vacant.

On a rainy day, having just filled his car up with gas at the local station, a wild woman storms out of a car with her boyfriend, and jumps into Quoyle's car, ordering him to take off. Petal Bear (Cate Blanchett) has big hair, wears short, tight skirts, heavy makeup and constantly chews gum. Full of raw sex appeal and bouncing from lover to lover, she decides to make Quoyle, who falls madly in love with her, her next man. They have a child, Bunny (Alyssa, Kaitlyn and Lauren Gainer), but Petal will be winning no mother-of-the-year awards. She's gone most of the time and when she's not, she has her new boyfriends sleep over with her in the living room. When Quoyle's parents die and leave him absolutely nothing, she ultimately decides she's had enough, splits, and takes Bunny with her. Quoyle is devastated.

The wind-beaten, dilapidated old Quoyle home on the coast of Newfoundland is still standing only because it is cabled onto its cliff. Quoyle needs to get a job to help pay for the repairs and applies to be a typesetter with the local paper, a job he held in his previous town. The owner of "The Gammy Bird" makes him a reporter instead. His job is to cover the shipping news, identifying the ships that enter and leave port. Quoyle quickly learns the ropes and becomes an insightful indispensable reporter. He transforms from dim-witted to fully charged.

Bunny reluctantly starts school and befriends the teacher's brain damaged son. Quoyle falls in love with the teacher, Wavey (Julianne Moore). She has a secret history, as does Aunt Agnis. Once these secrets are purged they all are set free from their haunting demons.

Tell Me More About It: My biggest problem with this movie is that Quoyle transforms from a brainless, spineless zombie into a pretty cool and substantial guy way too quickly and without a major catalyst. His dim-wittedness is overplayed and that leaves us unconvinced and unconnected to the newly transformed Quoyle in Newfoundland.

Additionally there are holes dealing with the house and his little girl. Bunny seems to have special powers and keeps seeing a ghost haunting the outside of the house. This ghost turns out to be another Quoyle who for some reason lives in a run down little shack not far from the main house. So Bunny doesn't have extra sensory powers it appears, yet at one point she instinctively knows the house has been destroyed in a storm. We also never really understand why the Quoyles decide to move out of this house in the first place, which is conveniently demolished the next day by a storm (even though it has withstood constant brutal weather for decades). There are also disjointed haunting scenes of the original clan members who pirated ships and brutally murdered the sailors. All of these elements are intriguing but are not significantly incorporated into the story. We are left with a fragmented, choppy movie despite the simplicity of the landscape and nature of the main characters.

I so greatly enjoyed Lasse Hallstrom's Chocolat and Cider House Rules that I went into this movie thoroughly expecting to love it. It has a great cast and is beautifully filmed, but the story is unconvincing and leaves us bouncing on the surface of these stormy seas.

Kevin Spacey: American Beauty	Judi Dench: Chocolat
Wavey: Hannibal	Cate Blanchett: Lord of the Rings
Alyssa, Kaitlyn, Lauren Gainer: Cast Away	Lasse Hallstrom: Chocolat, Cider House Rules

Quoyle: Kevin Spacey	Wavey: Julianne Moore
Agnis: Judi Dench	Petal Bear: Cate Blanchett
Director: Lasse Hallstrom	Bunny: Alyssa, Kaitlyn, Lauren Gainer