Almost perfect

Rating: 10/10 (20 September 2009)

This is as close to a perfect film as I believe I have ever seen. Everything about it just WORKS. Stephen King famously sells his stories to filmmakers for one dollar, well this has got to be the best dollar he has ever spent. Shawshank arrived with no fanfare, no big premiere, it just opened. When I first read the Stephen King story, I thought it would be one of the best King stories to be made into a film I could imagine, and Frank Darabont did not let me down.
Casting Morgan Freeman was probably the biggest coup for this film, he is the absolute soul of dignity in everything he appears in, Tim Robbins, relatively unknown at the time of filming, is a revelation. It is, in fact, almost impossible to imagine any other actors in a single role in this film it is so perfectly cast. Then there is the music, so wonderfully incidental and appropriate. I could go on and on about specifics, photography, lighting, but it is probably best to say that anyone with a heart and a keen eye for good film-making should not miss this film. Every time I watch it I have a lump in my throat for nearly the entire running time, maybe because I have such a soft spot for it, but also because, when you know the story and it unfolds for you, every time you watch it different emotions come to the fore. There have been criticisms that Shawshank is nothing more than the most manipulative form of emotional heart-string tugging, but those criticisms are wrong, whenever Darabont was at risk of overdoing it with the manipulation, he pulled back. There is a moment near the end when it would have been perfectly appropriate for Freeman's character to burst into tears (the character does in the story), but he does not. It is an immensely effective moment, the expression on his face is so convincing that you cannot help but be reduced to tears yourself. Whether it was the actors decision or the directors is as irrelevant as the many detractors of this beautifully realised masterpiece.