Shamelessly old-fashioned, manipulative entertainment with Biblical connotations

Rating: Null/10 (19 March 2011)

The year is 1947 and "tall glass of water with a silver spoon up his ass" Andy Dufresne is sentenced to serve two back-to-back life sentences in Shawshank Penitentiary for the 'cold-blooded' murder of his wife and her lover. We are shown flashbacks to the events leading up to their slaying, but not enough for us to convict Andy along with the judge and this makes for an intriguing character watching the movie for the first time 'round. Inside the walls of Shawshank, Andy still claims his innocence, only to find he isn't alone. But it isn't long before he approaches go-to-guy Ellis 'Red' Redding for a rock hammer and Rita Hayworth poster, eventually becoming best buddies with him.
The theme of the piece is freedom and what it means to the men inside. The elderly 'Brooks' Hatlen is what Darabont calls "the spine of the story", who walks the straight and narrow path upon his release from prison but whose institutionalisation holds him back from enjoying free life and participating in the outside world. Red is also "an institutional man" whose constant rejections from the parole board have led him to believe that hope is a bad thing. Whereas seemingly infinite oasis of hope Andy, who after being raped constantly by 'the Sisters' and being sent way down in the hole a buncha times, still maintains his spirit. "Salvation lies within", as the Warden says.
However, there is also a physical journey Brooks, Red and Andy take. Prison represents Hell in this very symbolically Christian story, the halfway-house Brooks and Red go through, Purgatory, and Zihuatanejo, the "warm place with no memory" is of course, Heaven. Andy is even baptised after escaping the walls of the prison when he falls out of the sewage pipe into the water of the crick in the pouring rain. The most seemingly Christian man in the movie, Warden, is actually the Devil with sadistic Captain Hadley as his Beelzebub.
Writer and director Frank Darabont uses posters of sex symbols Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe and Raquel Welch to mark the passage of time Andy serves (just under twenty years) inside, while Andy uses them to cover up his escape route. 'The Shawshank Redemption' may appear to be in colour at first, but it is very much a black-and-white old-school Capra story, with modern blood, profanity and references to sodomy. Bad guys are bad guys and good guys are good guys. The Hollywood way is a timeless thing. People climb out of sewers without a trace of turd on them and show no visible signs of ageing in twenty years.
The movie has the same values of Capra, whom Darabont acknowledges as a major influence, and that isn't a bad thing when you stand it up against the largely nihilistic or simply stylistic movies of it's era, ergo all of QT's work, Scorsese's gangster pictures of that decade etc. The American film industry of the time's fondness for the downer ending, or lack of one was probably what drove the public out to the rental stores in the mid-nineties in search of this after the perhaps off-puttingly schmaltzy Gumpfest of this movie's year in the cinema failed to relate to many on a human level.
'Shawshank' has the necessary grit and real-life situations for a modern audience to get into it, but it also tells them what to think and feel with it's near constant narration and score like a movie from the forties might have. This is perhaps why it is such a firm favourite of the casual viewer, as it carries them along rather than allowing them to figure anything out or decide on their own ending. What the enormous popularity of the picture proves is that viewers would rather not be challenged but rather placated.