Film Review: The Shawshank Redemption
Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman Form Lasting Friendship
Apr 30, 2007
The Shawshank Redemption, based on the short story written by Stephen King is a tale of a mild mannered banking executive Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) who discovers that his wife is having an affair with another man. She turns up dead shortly afterwards and Dufresne is brought to trial and convicted. He is ordered to serve two consecutive life sentences in Maine's Shawshank prison beginning in 1947.
Another inmate is beaten to death on Andy's first night in prison by the captain of the guards Byron Hadley, (Clancy Brown) and the warden of Shawshank is a religious zealot who rules the prison with an iron fist, Samuel Norton (a wonderfully cool performance by Bob Gunton).
The first connection that Andy makes with another prisoner is when he strikes up a conversation with Red, (Morgan Freeman) a lifer who knows how to cope with the hopelessness of prison life. Red is also skilled at smuggling all kinds of items into Shawshank, and is confused when Andy's first request is for a rock hammer. It turns out that Andy has many interests such as rock carving, and his financial expertise helps the warden and some of the guards accumulate personal fortunes. But life in jail is perilous for Andy as he tries to protect himself from a group of prison thugs, who beat him within an inch of his life. And the warden does not hesitate to put him in solitary confinement every once in a while, just to remind him who is really in charge.
The years pass and Red has another interview at a parole hearing. He pleads his case with less conviction and he is denied a release from Shawshank once again. Andy, on the other hand, is determined to build a new library to honour a past inmate who was the prison librarian for nearly fifty years, Brooks Hatlen (James Whitmore). Although Brooks was freed from the stone walls of Shawshank, he couldn't bear the idea of being on the outside where he couldn't re-integrate himself back into society, and finally took his own life. Red commented that "They send you here for life, and that's exactly what they take......the part that counts anyway."
Some information about the real killer of Andy's wife and her lover was passed on to him from a younger inmate named Tommy (Gil Bellows). Andy pleads with Norton to look into the matter further and to help him get a new trial but the warden dismisses him, and sentences him to a month in solitary. Tommy is shot to death to prevent him from talking any further, and the situation for Andy looks very grim when he refuses to help Norton launder money. He spends another thirty days in the bowels of the prison, and the audience is left wondering if he will ever get out of Shawshank.
Andy saves his best surprises right until the end. He makes a Houdini like escape by digging through the wall with his trusty rock hammer, and goes down to Mexico with a new identity in a shiny convertible bought with Norton's money, which Andy had cleverly diverted. In 1967 Red is finally given parole after forty years in Shawshank, and makes the decision to go down and join Andy.
Hope is the door through which Andy and Red reclaim their freedom, and the film ends with a fitful embrace on a deserted beach.
