Enjoyable but vastly overrated

Rating: Null/10 (22 August 2003)

I read the short story "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" when I was in high school and enjoyed it quite a bit. I vaguely remember when this movie was in the theaters but I don't think anyone I know actually went to see it. Imagine my surprise, almost 10 years later, when it's rated the #2 movie ever made by IMDB users! Having finally had a chance to see the movie, I'm still just as surprised.
This isn't a bad movie. It's a good movie. In some ways, it's a very good movie. But it's certainly not a great movie. Better than Casablanca? Better than Citizen Kane? Better than The Seven Samurai? I don't think so. As cornball melodrama, it's not even better than the first Star Wars. What could possibly account for this movie's inexplicable popularity?
As I say, it's not a bad movie. The acting is generally good, and Freeman and Robbins are both typically excellent. Roger Deakins' photography is, of course, gorgeous. The story itself is compelling (a "page-turner"), as are most of Stephen King's stories.
Yet under it all, the story is just as much a fantasy as any of King's horror novels. While it's presented as a serious drama about prison life and the tenacity of the human spirit (and make no mistake, every emotion, every significant action in this movie is foreshadowed, highlighted and generally telegraphed to the degree that there's absolutely no doubt as to how the director expects you to react), the storyline and characters are so simplistically drawn that the movie wouldn't have rung significantly less true if an army of vampires had appeared in the final reel. This is a mawkish, sentimental and highly manipulative movie where the evil characters are pure, unadulturated evil and the good characters are the unsullied embodiment of pure nobility. It's the male equivalent of one of those Lifetime Channel movies where the woman's abusive boyfriend sleeps with her sister, steals her car, poisons her cat and kidnaps her developmentally disabled daughter to another state. It's pure melodrama, and while the great performances and photography make it enjoyable to watch, they can't change the fact that it is, Freeman's voice-over notwithstanding, a fairy tale.
It's hard to really care for anyone in this movie because the characters and their struggles are so completely cliched and cartoony. There never seems to be the least chance of Robbins' sprit being broken and the rest of the prisoners rarely seem any more perturbed by their incarceration than the prisoners on "Hogan's Heroes". There is something of a plot twist near the end, but it's telegraphed almost two hours in advance and there isn't really any question of the movie ending up any differently than it does. What we're left with is a beautifully-filmed, well-acted movie without the slightest hint of subtlety, nuance or ambiguity. This is the sort of movie where it's not enough to give the hypocritical, self-righteously religious warden a wall hanging that says "His judgement cometh, and that right soon." We also have to cut to a quick shot of the hanging right before the warden gets his comeuppance, just to make sure that not one single person in the audience misses the incredible irony.
It's supposed to be a celebration of the triumph of the spirit, but since there never seems to be the slightest chance that Robbins' spirit *won't* triumph, we're left with no more genuine suspense than we would get waiting for the cavalry to appear in an old-time western. What could have been an above-average B-movie has been turned into an overwrought, ham-handed, pretentious melodrama.