Too hefty, it turns out, but Hallstrom’s connection to the material is direct and unforced: Quoyle, a man forever uncomfortable in his own skin, fits nicely alongside such past Hallstrom oddities as Gilbert Grape. Though some have doubted, during the eight long years it took for the story to go from page to screen, that there was a movie in a novel so resolutely irreducible and stuffed with seeming asides that are actually essential to the story, the movie is clearly the work of sincere artists faced with a hefty task. Markedly well-cast, with the glaring exception of Kevin Spacey as the tale’s unsure hero, Quoyle, Nor’easter drama’s deliberate pace - making it feel more like Hallstrom’s European work than his Yank pics - and characters who ever so gradually reveal themselves will be appreciated by a dedicated but far smaller aud than Miramax must be hoping for during its annual high holiday season. Certain alterations made to the book’s characters and situations, designed to build suspense, become artificial and are delivered without the kind of conviction that would justify the changes. Annie Proulx’s beloved novel of a sad, failed American rediscovering himself in Newfoundland seems to be playing the author’s music, but like a string quartet that plays a half-beat off, the team behind “Chocolat” only occasionally captures the story’s essential tones of absurd tragedy and comedy. Director Lasse Hallstrom’s and scribe Robert Nelson Jacobs’ adaptation of E.

As ungainly as its central, befuddled character, “The Shipping News” never quite finds its own internal compass.

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