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BBC

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e.g. Journalism

From September 1994

“The Shawshank Redemption” is a movie about time, patience and loyalty — not sexy qualities, perhaps, but they grow on you during the subterranean progress of this story, which is about how two men serving life sentences in prison become friends and find a way to fight off despair.

The story is narrated by “Red” Redding (Morgan Freeman), who has been inside the walls of Shawshank Prison for a very long time and is its leading entrepreneur. He can get you whatever you need: cigarettes, candy, even a little rock pick like an amateur geologist might use. One day he and his fellow inmates watch the latest busload of prisoners unload, and they make bets on who will cry during their first night in prison, and who will not. Red bets on a tall, lanky guy named Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins), who looks like a babe in the woods.

But Andy does not cry, and Red loses the cigarettes he wagered. Andy turns out to be a surprise to everyone in Shawshank, because within him is such a powerful reservoir of determination and strength that nothing seems to break him. Andy was a banker on the outside, and he’s in for murder. He’s apparently innocent, and there are all sorts of details involving his case, but after a while they take on a kind of unreality; all that counts inside prison is its own society — who is strong, who is not — and the measured passage of time.

Red is also a lifer. From time to time, measuring the decades, he goes up in front of the parole board, and they measure the length of his term (20 years, 30 years) and ask him if he thinks he has been rehabilitated. Oh, most surely, yes, he replies; but the fire goes out of his assurances as the years march past, and there is the sense that he has been institutionalized — that, like another old lifer who kills himself after being paroled, he can no longer really envision life on the outside.

Red’s narration of the story allows him to speak for all of the prisoners, who sense a fortitude and integrity in Andy that survives the years. Andy will not kiss butt. He will not back down. But he is not violent, just formidably sure of himself. For the warden (Bob Gunton), he is both a challenge and a resource; Andy knows all about bookkeeping and tax preparation, and before long he’s been moved out of his prison job in the library and assigned to the warden’s office, where he sits behind an adding machine and keeps tabs on the warden’s ill-gotten gains. His fame spreads, and eventually he’s doing the taxes and pension plans for most of the officials of the local prison system.

There are key moments in the film, as when Andy uses his clout to get some cold beers for his friends who are working on a roofing job. Or when he befriends the old prison librarian (James Whitmore). Or when he oversteps his boundaries and is thrown into solitary confinement. What quietly amazes everyone in the prison — and us, too — is the way he accepts the good and the bad as all part of some larger pattern than only he can fully see.

The partnership between the characters played by Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman is crucial to the way the story unfolds. This is not a “prison drama” in any conventional sense of the word. It is not about violence, riots or melodrama. The word “redemption” is in the title for a reason. The movie is based on a story, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, by Stephen King, which is quite unlike most of King’s work. The horror here is not of the supernatural kind, but of the sort that flows from the realization than 10, 20, 30 years of a man’s life have unreeled in the same unchanging daily prison routine.

The director, Frank Darabont, paints the prison in drab grays and shadows, so that when key events do occur, they seem to have a life of their own.

Andy, as played by Robbins, keeps his thoughts to himself. Red, as Freeman plays him, is therefore a crucial element in the story: His close observation of this man, down through the years, provides the way we monitor changes and track the measure of his influence on those around him. And all the time there is something else happening, hidden and secret, which is revealed only at the end.

“The Shawshank Redemption” is not a depressing story, although I may have made it sound that way. There is a lot of life and humour in it, and warmth in the friendship that builds up between Andy and Red. There is even excitement and suspense, although not when we expect it. But mostly the film is an allegory about holding onto a sense of personal worth, despite everything. If the film is perhaps a little slow in its middle passages, maybe that is part of the idea, too, to give us a sense of the leaden passage of time, before the glory of the final redemption.

And in 1999 he wrote this as an update:

“The Shawshank Redemption” premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September 1994, and opened a few weeks later. It got good reviews but did poor business (its $18 million original gross didn’t cover costs; it took in only another $10 million after winning seven Oscar nominations, including best picture).

There wasn’t much going for it: It had a terrible title, it was a “prison drama” and women don’t like those, it contained almost no action, it starred actors who were respected but not big stars, and it was long at 142 minutes. Clearly this was a movie that needed word-of-mouth to find an audience, and indeed business was slowly but steadily growing when it was yanked from theaters. If it had been left to find its way, it might have continued to build and run for months, but that’s not what happened.

Instead, in one of the most remarkable stories in home video history, it found its real mass audience on tapes and discs, and through TV screenings. Within five years, “Shawshank” was a phenomenon, a video best seller and renter that its admirers feel they’ve discovered for themselves. When the Wall Street Journal ran an article about the “Shawshank” groundswell in April 1999, it was occupying first place in the Internet Movie Database worldwide vote of the 250 best films; it’s usually in the top five.

Polls and rentals reflect popularity but don’t explain why people value “Shawshank” so fervently. Maybe it plays more like a spiritual experience than a movie. It does have entertaining payoff moments (as when the guards from another prison, wearing their baseball uniforms, line up to have Andy do their taxes). But much of the movie involves quiet, solitude, and philosophical discussions about life. The moments of violence (as when Andy is sexually assaulted) are seen objectively, not exploited.

The movie avoids lingering on Andy’s suffering; after beatings, he’s seen in medium and long shot, tactfully. The camera doesn’t focus on Andy’s wounds or bruises, but, like his fellow prisoners, gives him his space.

The Morgan Freeman character is carrier of the film’s spiritual arc. We see him at three parole hearings, after 20, 30 and 40 years. The first hearing involves storytelling trickery; the film has opened with Andy’s sentencing, and then we see a parole board, and expect it’s about to listen to Andy’s appeal. But, no, that’s when we first see Red. In his first appeal he tries to convince the board he’s been rehabilitated. In the second, he just goes through the motions. In the third, he rejects the whole notion of rehabilitation, and somehow in doing so he sets his spirit free, and the board releases him.

There’s an underlying problem. Behind bars, Red is king. He’s the prison fixer, able to get you a pack of cigarettes, a little rock pick or a Rita Hayworth poster. On the outside, he has no status or identity. We’ve already seen what happened to the old librarian (James Whitmore), lonely and adrift in freedom. The last act, in which Andy helps Red accept his freedom, is deeply moving – all the more so because Andy again operates at a distance, with letters and postcards, and is seen through Red’s mind.

Frank Darabont wrote and directed the film, basing it on a story by Stephen King. His film grants itself a leisure that most films are afraid to risk. The movie is as deliberate, considered and thoughtful as Freeman’s narration. There’s a feeling in Hollywood that audiences have short attention spans and must be assaulted with fresh novelties. I think such movies are slower to sit through than a film like “Shawshank,” which absorbs us and takes away the awareness that we are watching a film.

Deliberate, too, is the dialogue. Tim Robbins makes Andy a man of few words, quietly spoken. He doesn’t get real worked up. He is his own man, capable of keeping his head down for years and then indulging in a grand gesture, as when he plays an aria from Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.” (The overhead shot of the prisoners in the yard, spellbound by the music, is one of the film’s epiphanies.) Because he does not volunteer himself, reach out to us or overplay his feelings, he becomes more fascinating: It is often better to wonder what a character is thinking than to know.

Roger Deakins’ cinematography is tactful, not showy. Two opening shots, one from a helicopter, one of prison walls looming overhead, establish the prison. Shots follow the dialogue instead of anticipating it. Thomas Newman’s music enhances rather than informs, and there is a subtle touch in the way deep bass rumblings during the early murder are reprised when a young prisoner recalls another man’s description of the crime.

Darabont constructs the film to observe the story, not to punch it up or upstage it. Upstaging, in fact, is unknown in this film; the actors are content to stay within their roles, the story moves in an orderly way, and the film itself reflects the slow passage of the decades. “When they put you in that cell,” Red says, “when those bars slam home, that’s when you know it’s for real. Old life blown away in the blink of an eye. Nothing left but all the time in the world to think about it.” Watching the film again, I admired it even more than the first time I saw it. Affection for good films often grows with familiarity, as it does with music. Some have said life is a prison, we are Red, Andy is our redeemer. All good art is about something deeper than it admits.