"The Shawshank Redemption" is a prison movie with a feel good ending. It received seven Academy Award nominations, and has since become a public favorite. Turner's TNT and TBS superstations show it seemingly every weekend, and it is firmly established near the summit of the Internet Movie Database's top 250 list, where it has spent time at number 1. This means that tens of thousands of people have taken the time to vote for the film, the vast majority of which have assigned the film a perfect ten out of ten.
The film's story begins in the year 1946. Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) is an innocent man convicted of murdering his wife and her lover. He is sent to prison in Shawshank to serve dual life sentences. There, he encounters bad food, brutal guards, and a group of inmates called 'the sisters'. Led by Bogs Diamond (Mark Rolston), Andy's refusal to give in to their sexual demands results in frequent severe beatings.
But finally, life begins to improve for Andy. He makes friends with benevolent lifer Red (Morgan Freeman). He becomes a tax attorney for the guards and warden, who in return grant him privileges that include a cushy job at the library. He helps the warden (Bob Gunton) launder the money from kickbacks, making him too valuable for the warden to lose. This causes problems for Andy when proof of his innocence arises.
If "The Shawshank Redemption" is viewed uncritically, it is a heartwarming story of an unfairly convicted man overcoming hateful adversity to triumph, and for good measure helping out his best friend. Certainly, seeing the film from this perspective, buying into all the manipulations and dubious characters, would make for pleasing entertainment. But the same could be said for any movie. Films have to be examined critically.
First of all, Andy isn't the heroic figure that he is depicted to be. This is a man who threatens to kill his wife, then stalks her with a loaded handgun. He participates eagerly in the warden's kickback schemes, which he reveals only when double crossed. Finally, he steals this illegal money, and escapes from prison. Stellar character.
The story tries to demonstrate his manhood by his not crying the first night in prison, by his refusal to submit to 'the sisters', and his not ratting on them for their frequent beatings. While it is unfortunate that Andy is a victim of prison violence, this doesn't make him a man, and who cares if he's too tough to cry. The manipulations are so obvious. When Bogs is finally brutally beaten in return, we are expected to cheer. If anyone deserves what he gets, Bogs does, but that doesn't condone sadistic guards beating prisoners to paralysis.
One scene has Andy playing opera music over the loudspeaker, while the guards and warden go ballistic since they are locked out and unable to stop him. The prisoners stand in amazement. Why, they've never heard anything like that before! Real culture! Andy enjoys his moment of rebellion with a smug smile, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a stupid thing to do.
Then there's the character of Tommy (Gil Bellows). Tommy is a likable, friendly guy who just happens to have committed a series of crimes landing him in state prison. He looks like Elvis from 1956, but by now the story is set in the mid-sixties. In a preposterous story twist, he is killed by the warden and his cynical head guard (Clancy Brown). The warden has memorized every verse of the Bible, but is willing to murder somebody on the remote chance that his potential hearsay testimony will lead to Andy's freedom? Despite the likelihood that Andy will get his revenge, through the books if nothing else?
Then there's the guard who is willing to throw Andy off a building roof, which would possibly kill him, in front of dozens of witnesses. There's Andy's unlikely escape, which involves two decades of minework in the same cell with no roommate, undetected and with a flimsy poster covering the evidence. And how did the poster get hung back up after he exited through the hole? And why doesn't the cast age after two decades have passed?
The Academy apparently was not concerned with the weaknesses in the story or characters. While it failed to land any Oscars, "The Shawshank Redemption" was nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (Freeman, who should have been nominated for Best Narrator instead), Best Adapted Screenplay (Frank Darabont, from a novel by Steven King), and Best Cinematography (Roger Deakins), as well as Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, and Best Sound. (59/100)
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