The key to good journalism, notes a character in The Shipping News, is to find the headline. Advice not taken by Annie Proulx, who immerses her bestseller in the quotidian and digressive and ties knots of many kinds. But that won’t wash for a big holiday release, so the headline for this Lasse Hallström adaptation might read "Oscar Winners in Another Manipulative Melodrama."

Quoyle (Kevin Spacey in dumb rather than smug mode) moves back to his native Newfoundland after his slutty wife, Petal (Cate Blanchett, savoring a break from Elf robes), gets killed in a crash. There he settles in to write the title column for the local rag and turns up various lurid secrets that almost reduce him to the shambles of Spacey’s character in K-PAX. Salvation, of course, is no farther away than the lovely widow Wavey (Julianne Moore), with her adorable mentally challenged boy. Hallström offers some poetic moments, such as a house dragged across the ice (true, it’s been done before), and Scott Glenn and Rhys Ifans craft appealing performances. Otherwise, this is turgid as well as crass: old news.