Nick-Davis.com: The Shawshank Redemption

The Shawshank Redemption
First screened in April 1995 / Most recently screened and reviewed in September 2024

Director: Frank Darabont. Cast: Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman, Bob Gunton, Clancy Brown, William Sadler, James Whitmore, Gil Bellows, Mark Rolston, Brian Libby, Larry Brandenburg, Neil Guintoli, David Proval, Joseph Ragno, Jude Ciccolella, Paul McCrane, Jeffrey DeMunn. Screenplay: Frank Darabont (based on the novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King).

VOR: ③ For many people, its value is unsurpassed. I doubt originality or artistic risk-taking are the reasons. But it has... something.

For me, the hardest part of The Shawshank Redemption is fighting the urge to mentally recast Tim Robbins. It's not an unfamiliar situation with him. My gaze just slides over and around the tiny eyes and unusual curves of that face, the inexpressive carriage of that hulking body, the ineloquent voice. He seems to be working hard at things that ought to be easy, from a resting facial expression to a conversations about rocks to an enraged pantomime of sexual jealousy to just leaning backward in a chair, hands behind your head, exhaling, flush with a rare surge of epicurean contentment. Robbins doesn't overact the role (this isn't Mystic River, or War of the Worlds, or Catch a Fire, or Hudsucker Proxy, or...), but I still sense him hitting marks, following directions, pulling faces from amidst vague bewilderment, delivering gestures and effects that are no less bland and not much clearer for feeling so studied, so premeditated.

I have entertained lots of possibilities over time for alternate Andy Dufresnes, each viable from an early/mid 90s casting standpoint. Maybe someone whose gentleness and intelligence are palpable but who isn't inconceivable as a crime-of-passion murderer (Vincent D'Onofrio? Hank Azaria?) Maybe someone who seems smart enough to calculate taxes and get the warden out of some extralegal jams but whom you still wouldn't suspect of grander schemes (Steve Zahn?). Maybe someone inwardly haunted and recently roughed up by a few years of hard road, but who's hanging on by a thread nonetheless, as is some ember of his Everyman goodness (Michael Biehn?). Someone. My dream casting is Michael Peña, but Shawshank's a few years too early for that.

Robbins gets the job done fine while the plot's humming and the ambience is in place and our eye is more trained on King's and Darabont's overall yarn and the wider prison community than on nuances of performance. But as soon as we or the camera start paying closer attention to Andy, I just don't get this take on the character. Even standing in the rain, arms outstretched in that climactic, now-iconic pose, Robbins doesn't convince me. Whoever that is on the poster is selling that moment better.

The easiest part of The Shawshank Redemption for me is admiring the dimensionality and tempered classicism of Roger Deakins's photography, not straining for effect as he would increasingly do once he got more practiced and more famous (though, let's be clear, the strain is often victorious!), but giving Shawshank a beat-by-beat elegance that doesn't strut, doesn't impose any tinted glass between us and the world of story and character. Another easiest part is savoring Thomas Newman's score, especially in the passages where he's erring on the side of restraint, even dolorous minimalism. Another easiest part is admiring the battle-tested craft of James Whitmore but also a level of taciturn poignancy I'd never seen from that performer (and then, suddenly, a flash of savage temper!). Another easiest part is relishing the heyday of Morgan Freeman, cast as an actual character and not a figurehead for anything, just being the guy the script says he is while hiding all the work required to conjure that impression—and sure, subtly signaling depths and difficulties in Red beyond what this story explores. We've all seen plenty of movies where we wish the protagonist might step aside so that the intriguing, charismatic second lead might advance into the light. This time, our wish comes true. The way Shawshank gives itself over to Freeman for its last 20 minutes is a gift to everyone (the actor, the character, the audience), and even then he resists the urge to grandstand.

A trickier part of Shawshank is remembering the finer points of this plot, even a few weeks after I've re-seen it, much less after the 10 or 15 years that have separated each of my three viewings. On this third pass, Shawshank felt like a new movie in several details, though the overall contour stayed the same. I.e., the film remains the solid line drive I perceived in April 1995, when Columbia briefly put it back in theaters, hoping its Oscar nominations might spark the box-office fire that so completely eluded the initial September release. I always thought The Shawshank Redemption was an exemplar of the kind of mid-grade, fully proficient Story Hour that Hollywood companies ought to turn out often, and that Hollywood audiences ought to support more vigorously than we do but should also have every right to expect from this industry.

The strangest part is trying to grasp exactly how The Shawshank Redemption has become the gargantuan crowd-pleaser and cultural mainstay it somehow became. Let's set aside that I feel weird about the #1 most popular movie on IMDb having literally no women in it except a half-glimpsed wife who soon gets blown away. After all, it's not an emergency, there are at least four or five women strewn across the top ten user-voted titles. Whew! Nothing to see here. I'm used to the feeling, which all of us have had, of "I just don't like this perfectly fine thing as much as you love it." I just tend to find it easier to encapsulate such a movie's appeal to its devotees. I perfectly understand liking or even loving The Shawshank Redemption. What's not to like? Love is love, baby. I don't understand its being the one film to rule them all, and that mantle weighs rather heavily by now on a film that's hardly asking for all that baggage.

But my best guess is that audiences of almost all nations, genders, ages, and stripes want to see more stories of tenderness and earnest allyship between men. I'm talking about platonic tenderness—not that we shouldn't see all kinds more often. There's a lot going on in the plot of The Shawshank Redemption (murder charges, prison rape, money laundering, rock hammers, screen sirens, petty tyrants, sewage drains, new evidence, midnight executions, unsurvivable freedoms, etc.) to assemble an ornate structure through which the movie can say, in effect, as powerfully as Freeman can say it, but also as quietly as his dulcet register can manage: "I loved my friend. He went away from me. There's nothing more to say. The poem ends, Soft as it began,— I loved my friend." (Look it up.)

I think the world is full of people who relate to the pathos of that, and need to hear that (any of that), and may be scared to say it, or unused to hearing it, especially from one grown man to another, which is the rarest way this sentiment ever gets voiced in public.

I underestimated this man, and he proved me wrong.

My path has not been this man's path, at all, yet I see part of myself in him, and him in me.

Even before I got free, this man's freedom made me feel freer.

But he went away, in whatever way he went away. And I miss my friend, for whatever reason and in whatever way I miss him. I might find him still. I can't even visualize what exactly that will look like. In my mind's eye, we're far apart even when we're close, or I'm too far away, or I clam up, or I freeze up, or I wake up. But the truth is, I just want my friend. I want, through all this hardship, in this terrible place, after so much ordeal, any friend. A real friend. A circle of friends, even on the spoiled terms of a polluted bigger picture. I loved my brothers, or love them still. I love my friend, or love him still.

My hunch is that Shawshank says this to people, and people are tantalized, and grateful, and amazed it got said, even if (especially if?) it didn't quite, not out loud. Loud enough. Grade: B

(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd.)

Academy Award Nominations:
	Best Picture
	Best Actor: Morgan Freeman
	Best Adapted Screenplay: Frank Darabont
	Best Cinematography: Roger Deakins
	Best Film Editing: Richard Francis-Bruce
	Best Original Score: Thomas Newman
	Best Sound: Robert J. Litt, Elliot Tyson, Michael Herbick, and Willie D. Burton

Golden Globe Nominations:
	Best Actor (Drama): Morgan Freeman
	Best Screenplay: Frank Darabont

Other Awards:
	American Society of Cinematographers: Best Cinematography

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