The Shipping News (2001)
- Information at Internet Movie Database
- Roger Ebert Review, Chicago Sun-Times.
- Movie Parables review.
- Hollywood Jesus visual review.
- Values & Visions Video Guide: The Shipping News, Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality & Health - Spiritual Practices for Human Being.
- Review, Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality & Health - Spiritual Practices for Human Being.
- Themes
- Garden of Eden
- Quoyle learns that his family had been banished from another island for their evil. There is a scene in which we see them dragging the ancestral home across the ice, as they have been evicted from their Eden. (Darrel Manson, Artesia, CA)
- Transformation,
Conversion, Rebirth, Father Figures
- Great movie on transformation, resurrection, clinging to the past, resisting transformation . . .Main character has experience of "drowning" in childhood with uncaring father that effects his life, is able to find new life in new place, is able to see how the past gets "drug" into everything and finally how to break free of that past. Great movie on so many themes. I plan to buy it for my collection. Watch it! (Rebecca Herring)
- Ubiquity of Sin/Evil
- Sin/Evil as a knot - good and evil are tangled together into a "knot" - "knot" images are seen throughout this film.
- Raising of Lazarus - Resurrection,
Rebirth
- The wake, during which Jack arises, is found at DVD ch 17. This entire movie is the story of rebirth for many characters, especially Quoyle, who is portrayed as the walking-dead. He finds life through confronting the "demons" of his past, and through finding community and relationship in a village in Newfoundland.
- Death
- DVD chapter 3 - Quoyle tells Bunny that Petal is "asleep with the angels" because Quoyle himself can't confront the death. Later, after Jack's wake (DVD 17), Bunny wants to know why they can't "wake" her mother, and Quoyle tells her the truth about Petal's death.
- Despair
- Before he moves to Newfoundland, Quoyle is the definition of despair. He has seen himself in relationship to others who have hurt him.
- Demons, Confrontation
with Evil, Baptism
- Quoyle has a literal confrontation with the "demons" of his past. He has seen himself (and steered his life accordingly) through the negative influence of his father and other family "demons" he has not recognized. He faces these forces and is reborn after a storm. (Baptism of the Spirit - Wind and Water - lots of water imagery in this film - drowning and being changed.)
- Garden of Eden
