Time and Pressure.

Rating: 7/10 (25 April 2016)

Keeping this short and sweet, meek Tim Robbins is a convicted accountant who is sent to a real MEAN prison in Maine. The captain of the corrections officers, the massive-jawed Clancy Brown, is quick with his baton, agitato, so to speak. The warden, Bob Gunton, is a corrupt dictator. Morgan Freeman, serving a life sentence, becomes a friend of Robbins. Robbins has a lot in the upper story and goes about doing good for the penitentiary and for the inmates, despite the beatings, attempted rapes, and unjust punishment.
Under his management the library becomes a beacon for all prison libraries. Many brutal years pass before Robbins, an amateur geologist, tunnels through the prison wall, hauling a bundle of ill-gotten pelf, crawls into a five-hundred yard long sewer pipe filled with excreta, and splashes through a river to freedom and a tiny coastal village in Mexico, Zijuataneco. I drove there about the time this escape takes place and it really WAS a cheap, peaceful, fishing town with an irregular water supply. Now it's a metropolis.
After forty years of imprisonment, Freeman is finally paroled. He joins his friend Robbins in Mexico, where they pursue an honest living as simple fishermen and become lovers for life. (Kidding.) It's a long movie but a gripping one. Movies about prisons are difficult to make. The surroundings are hardly epic, the wardrobe drab, the inmates participate in what the sociologist Erving Goffman called "the small rewards" system common to all total institutions -- gifts and trades of items like cigarettes and harmonicas. The inmates have humble jobs, nothing exciting about working in a laundry. No women. Threats and occasional fist fights but no open warfare. And here there's not even the suspense of watching men prepare for an escape. How do you fold these conditions together and come up with a story?
The people who produced "The Shawshank Redemption" have managed to pull it off, and without directorial display -- no fireworks, no instant cutting, no screechy metallic noise on the sound track, no razzle dazzle whatever, just classic movie making. The success of the film is helped ENORMOUSLY by Morgan Freeman's performance as the friend of Robbins. He's an exceptional actor, and though we may see him now mostly in the role of mentor, his early performances as a heavy shouldn't be ignored. God, he was one charming and terrifying pimp in "Street Smart."
Robbins does a good job too, although his role requires him to be subdued. It also requires him to be saintly, alas. There's nothing wrong with him. He's a genius, doing everybody's tax returns. He's more sinned against than sinning. Cool Hand Luke at least was reckless and expedient and brought the storm down upon himself. And Luke's guards would have made mincemeat out of Robbins.
Robbins' prison is a kind of fantasy land in which he can at will commandeer an office, lock the doors, and play a record of an opera over all the loudspeakers. It's also a pipe dream to believe that all of the inmates would stop what they're doing and stare in wonder at the loudspeakers broadcasting two ladies singing in Italian. Slim Whitman, maybe. But Joan Sutherland? They would have booed. Nor would inmates show the kind of solidarity on display here, once Robbins pulls them together. The coolest presentation of self in an institution like this is utter indifference, except for some offense against the honor of one's self or one's gang. It's a cold-hearted place in which practically nobody applauds when someone else succeeds.
However, put all the fantasy aside and accept it for what it is, a fictional tale of men who pay dearly for misdeeds and ultimately save themselves and undermine the foundation of corrupt society. Not heroically, just by sheer persistence.