Remember, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.
Wrongly accused of murdering his wife and her lover, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins – Jacobs Ladder, Mystic River), a young, successful vice president of a major bank, is sentenced to serve back-to-back life sentences in Shawshank State Penitentiary never gets too down in his circumstances, even though he will spend out his days behind bars. In contrast, his wife’s killer roams the streets free. The legendary fiction horror writer Steven King (The Shining, The Mist) introduced himself to a new kind of audience with this quiet and underrated (at its release) The Shawshank Redemption, a film that is nothing like Pet Semetary, IT, Cujo, Misery, Needful Things, Christine, Thinner, Carrie, Firestarter, Children of the Corn or a host of his other adapted horror novels adapted for film. The Shawshank Redemption is the complete opposite of a horror film. It is the crowning achievement of director Frank Darabont’s (The Green Mile, The Mist) career. This movie has been the highest-rated movie on the International Movie Database (IMDB) in the history of its website.
Set entirely in a fictional prison in Northeast America, The Shawshank Redemption is essentially a story about two strangers from different sides of the world who become the best of friends. The Narrator is a story of a man named Red (Morgan Freeman – Million Dollar Baby, Seven) who, when we meet him in 1947, is 20 years into a life sentence for plotting and carrying out the murder of his wife by disabling the brakes on her car. This tragedy killed not only her but also a neighbor and her child. Our first encounter with him is when he is denied his 20-year parole hearing. Soon after, Andy Dufresne and a dozen other men are brought to Shawshank. They are introduced to Prison Warden Norton (Bob Gunton – 61*, Argo) and head guard Byron Hadley (Clancy Brown – The Hurricane, The Informant!). After a new inmate is beaten to death so badly by the guards that he doesn’t survive his first night, we quickly learn that Shawshank is not where anyone wants to be.
Andy is a quiet man and stays to himself at first. He slowly introduces himself to Red. Red is known as the man in the prison who can get things. Andy asks for a small rock hammer to make carvings out of the various types of stone in the yard. A friendship then ensues. When Andy overhears Hadley talking one day about the taxes he’ll have to pay on a $35,000 inheritance ($35,000 was a lot of money back in 1947), Andy interjects and uses his knowledge of tax law to be able to avoid paying the taxes. In a move that would either get him thrown off the top of a three-story building or improve his standing with the guards, Andy is able to convince Hadley to save his life with some fast-talking. He wins over favor with the guards and, eventually, Warden Norton. It also gets Andy some office work rather than working in the yard, protection from the inmates who were previously harming him, and prestige with his fellow inmates for the small favors he can get him. Andy uses his banking skills to launder money for Officer Warden, a ruthless man who falsely hides behind The Bible and its preachings.
The theme of this movie is hope. It’s about having hope to sustain yourself through difficult, sometimes impossible, and often hopeless times. How can you go on when it seems your life will never improve? If we wanted to look at stories in The Bible, we certainly could. We could look at the story of Exodus and how the Israelites lived in Egyptian oppression for generations before God spoke to Moses, telling him he had come to rescue them out of the country through Moses’s help (Exodus 3: 7-10). There are other instances in which God had hope for people when the people had none. And the hope in The Shawshank Redemption is, in a way, similar. This movie is not about Andy’s hope for himself, but it is his hope for other people (namely Red). It’s an instance that almost all of us have been in, where we either don’t have hope, and we need to have the hope of others to sustain us through a difficult period. Or it is an instance where others were in such a desperate and hopeless situation that they needed the hope of us to get them through. In either case, it is interesting to view hope this way. Even in the movie’s climax, when Red is worried about Andy based on some of the things he has been saying and some of his recent actions, Andy provides Red the hope he knows that he will need to get him through difficult times ahead.
While I did say that his movie was underrated, I said it mainly because it had been more appreciated after its time than during its time. Though The Shawshank Redemption earned seven Academy Award nominations (including Best Picture), it did not win any of its seven nominations. Still, it would be hard for any movie to win awards during a year in which both Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction were up for consideration. Interestingly, Freeman was nominated for Best Lead Actor rather than Best Supporting Actor. If there’s ever a movie that messed that up, it might be this one. Red was a support role to Robbins and would have beaten out Martin Landau (Ed Wood) in that category. It was Freeman’s third Academy Award nomination for acting. He would have to wait ten more years in his storied career before he would get nominated again, winning the Best Supporting Actor award for 2004’s Million Dollar Baby.
Many factors worked against The Shawshank Redemption at its release, the least of which was not its 142-minute runtime. When released in 1994, Freeman and Robbins were respected stars but not big names. Also, the prison drama genre wasn’t exactly a $100 million box office guarantee. Heck, it wasn’t even a $10 million guarantee. The movie also had minimal action, featured zero women, and had a name that didn’t exactly roll off the tongue. It needed word of mouth to get it over the hump in terms of public opinion and recognition.
Something else that is unique about The Shawshank Redemption is its point of view. We never see Andy through Andy. Instead, we see him through Red (our narrator), through Warden Norton, through Brooks, Tommy, and a few other inmates, and a couple of the other guards. It is exciting to create such a protagonist, especially one so likable. As mentioned, this might be the crowning achievement in Robbins’ storied acting career. While he does have one Academy Award nomination and win (2003’s phenomenal Mystic River), the staying power of The Shawshank Redemption is like very few others in film history. It is much more than a cult classic because I associate cult classics with ones that aren’t necessarily always awesome and also resonate with a defined audience.
Plot 10/10
Character Development 10/10
Character Chemistry 10/10
Acting 10/10
Screenplay 10/10
Directing 10/10
Cinematography 10/10
Sound 10/10
Hook and Reel 10/10
Universal Relevance 10/10
100%
A+
Movies You Might Like If You Liked This Movie
- The Green Mile
- Forrest Gump
- Life Is Beautiful
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
- Papillon