A Very Good Movie

Rating: Null/10 (15 April 1999)

From the outside, the Shawshank State Prison looks like an English country home, with turreted corners and a wide open surrounding lawn. It's only when you get inside and see the walls and meet the brutal guards that you start to realize that the state government simply wants you out of sight and out of mind. And that if you die in Shawshank, the only reason that might interest the government or the public is that it will save them money.
The two main protagonists are Andy Durfresne (played by Tim Robbins) and Ellis Boyd "Red" Redding (played by Morgan Freeman). Andy is the new prisoner, a banker and investment expert convicted of killing his wife and her lover. Red is the experienced con, who makes do on the inside by smuggling cigarettes, whiskey, tooth brushes, movie posters, etc. into the prison, and facilitating a market between the prisoners and between the prisoners and the guards.
Two other important characters are prison Warden Norton (played by Bob Gunton) and the Captain Hadley (wonderfully played by Clancy Brown). Andy, obviously, isn't your usual prisoner. For one thing, he doesn't look very tough, certainly not tough enough to have killed anyone. Red bets that Andy will be the first of the new draft of prisoners to "break" during their first night locked in cells, by crying. And "The Sisters," prisoners who delight in raping other prisoners, target Andy from day one.
Well, both Red and "The Sisters" are wrong. Andy doesn't say a bad word about his confinement or his cell. And "The Sisters" have to beat the Hell out of Andy time after time to get any enjoyment out of him. (Another feature of prison life which Andy doesn't complain about.) What Andy does, is try to get on living. He has this hobby of rock carving, for which Red can supply the necessary tools and rocks. He is also good at doing things like filling out tax forms and giving investment advice. This skill comes to the attention of the Warden and the guards, especially Hadley. Soon, although not soon enough, Andy is given a trivial job in the prison library and protection from The Sisters in turn for providing investment advice to the guards and, for laundering all the money the Warden is making off the free labor he controls.
Andy does other things to. Over time he manages to turn the dark, basement library at the prison into a real library where other convicts can simply read or, with ambition, try for their high school credentials. In other words, Andy, although a convicted murder is good for the people around him, even a bunch of convicts doing hard time.
Is this the way prisons really operate? Can one person make the difference? Well, probably not. In fact I suspect Shawshank is shown to be a nicer place to live than any real state prison is, but the level of gross brutality displayed in the movie by both the guards and by some of the prisoners was all I wanted to see and enough to convince me that I wouldn't want to live there. Also, this is a movie about redemption, a rare enough event in ordinary life to motivate some "suspension of disbelief."
There's the other side of redemption too, which is punishment of the truly guilty. The Shawshank Redemption supplies both. And has fun doing so. In fact, when I saw most of the movie by accident on TV, I - who never watches TV - found myself yelling at the kids to be quite so I could follow everything that went on. And then I went out the next day and rented the video both to enjoy watching it again, and to help answer some left over questions, like "who really did get redemption?"
I strongly encourage you to see the movie to find out the answer to that, and several other questions.