The Shawshank Redemption
Frank Darabont (1994)
The Shawshank Redemption, adapted by Frank Darabont from a Stephen King novella, was something of a commercial phenomenon. It was never a sleeper but the initial box-office returns were disappointing. In 1995, however, video rental sales went through the roof; in later years, the film repeatedly drew large television audiences. (Wikipedia and IMDB indicate earnings of more than $58m against a budget of $25m.) Shawshank’s popular and critical reputation has also continued to grow. It didn’t win any of the seven Oscars for which it was nominated but the statement on Wikipedia that it ‘is now considered to be one of the greatest films of the 1990s’ is by no means over the top. This movie means a great deal to a great many. According to a 2004 Guardian article by Mark Kermode, which BFI used as their programme note for this month’s screening:
‘One viewer described their tape of The Shawshank Redemption as “like a friend in the sitting-room, who talked to me and picked me up when I was down” ’.
One of the film’s stars, Tim Robbins, is quoted in Kermode’s piece as follows:
‘… there isn’t a day when I’m not approached … by people who say how important that film is to them, who tell me that they’ve seen it 20, 30, 40 times, and who are just so … thankful.’
It’s impossible to gainsay this kind of enthusiasm. I find it more interesting than I found (most of) the movie to watch.
Square and unsubtle, The Shawshank Redemption tells, at considerable length (142 minutes), an indomitability-of-the-human-spirit story that’s reasonably good, if not especially original. The Shawshank State Penitentiary is a prison in Maine (a fictional one: the actual filming location was the Ohio State Reformatory). The protagonists, Andy Dufresne (Robbins) and Ellis ‘Red’ Redding (Morgan Freeman), are long-term inmates there. The redemption of the title refers to how these two make good what seemed bound to be decades of futility. Andy, sentenced to consecutive life sentences for the killing of his wife and her lover, keeps himself constructively busy. He escapes, after some eighteen years in prison and painstakingly preparing his getaway during much of that time. Red, also serving life for murder, spends forty years behind bars. He finally comes to realise that his friendship with Andy redeems that time in Shawshank.
Frank Darabont uses prison as a paradigm of privation and presents a life sentence as, in theory, a life wasted. But he isn’t so preoccupied with metaphor to stint on the violent detail. With the help of Roger Deakins’s fine, raw lighting of Shawshank, Darabont creates an oppressively bleak atmosphere. (You appreciate the power of Deakins’s cinematography most in the rare sequences outside the prison. Unhappy things occur in those too yet there’s an immediate sense of relief whenever the locale changes.) The various assaults on Andy, by malignant staff as well as prisoners, are gruelling viewing. This hyper-realistic strain of the film coexists with familiar generic elements – the characterisation of the main group of cons as a band of brothers, for example – but it leaves an impression on the audience. The grimness makes the happy ending feel earned.
There’s no denying that ending is strong and that The Shawshank Redemption is structurally clever. Andy has got away; Red is left feeling glad for him but sorry for himself – ‘I just miss my friend’. The screen goes dark and you think for a moment this may be the end of the film (to be honest, by this stage I hoped it was). Far from it. Red, by now too cynical to make the sincere plea for parole that has tried and failed before, gets it anyway. The early stages of his life outside are a rerun of what happened to the elderly Brooks Hatten (James Whitmore) earlier in the story. Released from Shawshank after half a century there, Brooks had become so institutionalised that he couldn’t function as a free man and took his own life. Red stops short of following suit only in order to honour a promise he made to Andy in jail (and to the audience) – to journey, if he ever got the chance, to a particular hayfield near Buxton, Maine and retrieve something that Andy says he buried there under a stone. Red finds the hayfield and, under a stone, money and a letter from Andy, inviting Red to join him in Zihuatanejo, Mexico. Red violates his parole in order to accept the invitation. He sets off for Mexico with new hope in his heart. This might seem enough for an upbeat ending but Frank Darabont leaves nothing to chance (or imagination). Red crosses the border in Texas and, suitcase in hand, arrives on a beach in Zihuatanejo. Andy is there to meet and greet him.
The happy reunion and events leading up it are all the more enjoyable thanks to Thomas Newman’s melodious score (you wallow in its emotional uplift even as you realise how the music is working you) and to Morgan Freeman’s acting which, in the closing stages, has a sovereign simplicity and eloquence. Though he’s awfully good throughout – and he and Tim Robbins work very well together – Freeman has a great deal of jail-spun wisdom to dispense in voiceover. Stephen King’s novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption is only seventy-one pages long: you sometimes feel Morgan Freeman must be reading it out in its entirety. King wrote Ellis Redding as an Irish American: Frank Darabont did well not only to cast Freeman in the role but to keep in Red’s reply, when asked why he’s called Red, ‘Maybe it’s because I’m Irish’. It has to be said that not only is Red ethnically distinctive in Shawshank but that the wide range of vices and abuses in evidence there don’t extend to even a whisper of racism.
As a young man keeping plenty to himself, Tim Robbins is convincing. He gives Andy Dufresne a preppy look – he’s credible as someone who was a banker in his pre-captivity life. Andy puts his professional knowhow to good use inside – initially as a desperate self-protective tactic, eventually as a means of ensuring he’s quids in after escaping. He also then exposes the money laundering engaged in by the crooked, whited-sepulchre governor (Bob Gunton) and others – criminal activity that Andy’s financial nous has enabled. (With the honourable exception of James Whitmore, the supporting cast isn’t up to much – their performances are strenuously one-dimensional.) Andy takes over the running of the prison library from Brooks Hatten and, as the one middle-class inmate of Shawshank, is virtually the sole repository of culture and education. This isn’t a great idea and results in two particularly corny parts of the narrative. When the library receives as a donation a collection of records, Andy plays part of The Marriage of Figaro over the prison’s public address system. He’s put in solitary as a result but not before Frank Darabont has shown the prisoners gathering en masse in the exercise yard to listen with rapt attention, their collective savage breast soothed by the charms of Mozart. (This would have so much better if even one of the inmates had asked, ‘What is this fancy crap?’) Then Andy coaches a new arrival, a burglar called Tommy Williams (Gil Bellows), to pass an exam. The contact between them that this involves makes it all the more surprising that Tommy takes so long – ie as long as the plot requires – to ask Red what Andy’s doing time for. It turns out Tommy was previously in jail with a man who confessed to the murders of which Andy was found guilty …
Andy has always claimed he was innocent but so have his fellow prisoners: as Red jokes, ‘Everyone in here’s innocent’ (Red himself admits to being a rare exception). Even without taking this running gag literally, it makes you wonder about Frank Darabont’s attitude towards custodial sentences generally. The rampant viciousness and corruption of the system – especially on the part of the staff who represent it – is enough to suggest that Darabont thinks prison is simply A Bad Thing (and the historical setting of the story – it begins in the late 1940s and ends in the late 1960s – seems beside the point). If that’s the case, you then have to ask what difference it would have made if Andy Dufresne had been a double murderer: wouldn’t his resourcefulness, his determination to make the best of his punishment, still be worthy of admiration? In theory, perhaps; in practice, no. It’s beyond reasonable doubt that, if Andy were guilty, many fewer people would be able to empathise with him. The capacity of fans of The Shawshank Redemption to identify with its characters, to the amazing extent that lots of them seem to do, depends heavily on believing those characters are doing their existentialist best to rise above a predicament they don’t deserve.
21 September 2017