A Sort of Secular Redemption

Rating: 9/10 (13 March 2009)

The story of this film takes place over a twenty-year period between 1947 and 1967. Andy Dufresne, a young banker from Portland, Maine, is wrongly convicted of murdering his wife and her lover, and sentenced to life imprisonment. ("Shawshank" is the name of the prison where he serves his sentence). The prison is a brutal place, and Andy is frequently beaten and sexually assaulted by a gang of homosexual inmates called "The Sisters". Two things, however, help him to survive. One is his friendship with another convict, Red, who has a reputation for being able to acquire almost any item and, for a price, to smuggle it into the prison. The other is his financial expertise, which he puts to good use, becoming a tax and financial adviser to the prison guards and even the Warden himself. As a reward for these services, Andy is given a privileged job in the prison library and protection from molestation. To avenge their attacks on Andy, the leader of the "Sisters" is so badly beaten by the guards that he is crippled for life; Andy is not molested again.
The Warden devises a scheme under which inmates are put to work on local construction projects. The purpose of this is ostensibly to prepare them for life after they are released, but in reality he is exploiting their free labour for his own personal profit, and using Andy's financial skills to launder the proceeds. This arrangement seems to work to Andy's advantage, because of the extra privileges he is granted, but things change when a new young prisoner named Tommy Williams is sent to Shawshank. Tommy has evidence that could secure Andy's release; a former cellmate in another prison has confessed to him that he committed the murders for which Andy was convicted. Tommy confides this secret to the Warden who, fearing that his illegal schemes will be revealed should Andy ever be released, arranges to have Tommy murdered by a corrupt guard.
There is a long history of American prison films, including the likes of "I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang", "Cool Hand Luke", "Brubaker" and the more recent "The Last Castle". (Frank Darabont was later to direct another prison film, "The Green Mile", based, like "The Shawshank Redemption" on a Stephen King story). Most of these were made with a liberal social agenda in mind, aiming to expose the harsh prison conditions and thereby inspire their reform. "The Shawshank Redemption" falls, to some extent, within this tradition; it is made from a basically liberal viewpoint and vividly depicts the brutality of prison life, although the fact that it is a period piece, set several decades in the past, might suggest that social issues were not the filmmakers' sole concern. Perhaps more important are the analysis of the nature of freedom and of the relationship between Andy and Red.
The word "prison", from the French "pris" ("taken"), merely indicates a place where captives are held, and the authorities, especially in America, prefer to describe many prisons by some more positive term such as "penitentiary" or "reformatory" which implies their purpose of rehabilitating criminals. Shawshank, a prison where the Warden and guards are at least as crooked as the inmates, has precisely the opposite effect. Andy goes in innocent of any crime and comes out guilty of being an accessory to corruption and fraud. Yet, despite his involvement in the Warden's dishonesty, Andy retains a certain integrity; he refuses to give up hope and refuses to allow himself to be beaten by the system. Although he is in prison he has found a sort of freedom. A key moment comes when he defies the guards to play a Mozart aria over the prison loudspeakers for all the inmates to hear- a reminder of spiritual values even in the harshest of environments.
Red faces a different problem. He fears that he has become so institutionalised that he will be unable to survive freedom, as happened to another long-term prisoner who committed suicide shortly after his release. In prison, his role as the "fixer" who can obtain anything, be it a packet of cigarettes, a rock hammer or a poster of Rita Hayworth, makes him the king of the inmates. (These latter two items will play an important role in the plot). On the outside he will be just another ex-con trying to make ends meet in a dead-end job. Paradoxically, he is more free in jail than he will be on the outside. I won't give away the ending, but it involves Andy repaying Red's previous kindnesses by showing him how he can be free in all senses of the word.
The film was not a great box office success when first released but has since acquired a status as one of the classics of the modern American cinema; it has now supplanted "The Godfather" as number one on IMDb's Top 250 list. The film would perhaps not be number one on my personal list, but it is a fine one and would certainly be in my top 250, perhaps the top 100. Its two stars, Tim Robbins as Andy and Morgan Freeman as Red, are both excellent. Its initial lack of success may have had something to do with its rather clumsy title. "Shawshank" is not a word that will mean anything to the average person (according to one story Darabont was once asked how his "rickshaw" film was going) and "redemption", except in technical legal contexts, normally has a religious connotation. This is not an explicitly religious film; indeed, in its portrayal of Warden Norton as a sanctimonious, Bible-bashing hypocrite, it can be seen as critical of religion. Nevertheless, the word "redemption" is perhaps appropriate in this context, after undergoing the hell of Shawshank Andy and Red manage to find a sort of secular redemption. It may be this message of hope that accounts for the film's continuing popularity. 9/10