Geeat movie

Rating: 9/10 (1 August 2016)

Stephen King's books have a distinctive voice - warm, sincere, inviting - that probably accounts for the appeal of his fiction just as much as his macabre imagination.
Yet none of the many movies adapted from King's work have managed to capture his singular, light, immediately recognizable tone.
Until now, that is: "The Shawshank Redemption," a first feature written and directed by Frank Darabont, finds the perfect cinematic equivalent to King's style. Based on the nonhorror novella "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," this is an engagingly simple, good-hearted film, with just enough darkness around the edges to give contrast and relief to its glowingly benign view of human nature.
Like much of King's work, "The Shawshank Redemption" is about an exceptional individual at odds with society, picked on or persecuted for the gifts that set him apart. In this case, the gift isn't supernatural, like Carrie's telekinetic powers, but moral and spiritual.
Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) is a gangly young banker when he enters Maine's fortresslike Shawshank State Prison in 1946, accused of killing his unfaithful wife and her lover. Though his protestations of innocence don't carry much weight, his shy manner and decency does. Befriended by Red (Morgan Freeman), a veteran con who is the prison fixer, he soon draws a circle of other boyishly likable prisoners around him, including William Sadler as a sweet-tempered thug and James Whitmore as a cuddly old man who is the prison librarian.
Like "Forrest Gump," to which "Shawshank" bears a coincidental but commercially convenient resemblance, this is a story of saintly endurance. Though Andy is abused by a prison bully who rapes him, a brutal guard who beats him and a crafty warden who uses Andy's banking skills to launder the vast amounts of cash he's siphoning off the system, Andy's patience, tolerance and selfless concern for his fellow man see him through.
The poster girl on his cell wall turns from Rita Hayworth to Marilyn Monroe to Raquel Welch, before providence rewards him with an opportunity to get some of his own back.
Those poster girls remain pretty much the only female presence in this snug, all-male environment, where the warm camaraderie suggests less a prison than a boys' club on an epic scale. So sweetly juvenile is the film's perspective that it comes as a shock to realize, in the final act, that King's story is at heart an elaborate revenge fantasy.
In a film that stands or falls on the central character's amiability, Tim Robbins is loose and effective, though the real performance here is from Morgan Freeman, whose projected affection for his friend really determines how we feel about him. Darabont's direction is precise and assured, without being terribly imaginative.