hope vs. certainty

Rating: 9/10 (1 June 2001)

Interpretation, spoilers:
Brooks represents complete complacency with life, so much so that any disturbance causes anxiety and suicidal ideation. Red also, for a time, represents this complacency. This movie is not simply a prison story, its message is generalized to mankind in general and it can be assumed that this complacency also represents modern man's need for routine - to the detriment of authentic living.
It takes an unjustly imprisoned man, Andy, to demonstrate to Red the life-or-death importance of hope and the freedom allowed by hope. As shown, hope entails slight fear because it necessarily interferes with order in life. Andy illustrates that this fear is a part of living, and renunciation from it results in an ingenuine sort of living.
Red soon realizes - given the rock hammer, the poster, and the mexico plans - that Andy had never given up his hope despite 19 years in prison. Hope and a sense of freedom and allowed even in prison, but not to all (music scene). For Red, it takes an actual physical freedom to live with a sense of hope. Andy, by exuding auras of hope from the beginning - though he would be expected to despair the most given his innocence - helps Red reach an epiphany of sorts; certainty and hope are mutually exclusive, and hope is always to be preferred. The Brook's path is shirked, and Red chooses life in all of its confusion, because true hope is omnipotent.