Stephen King's prison tale with a happy ending...

Rating: 7/10 (17 September 2006)

THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION is a kind of morality tale that is definitely one of Stephen King's more restrained kind of stories, dealing mostly with a character study of two individuals sharing imprisonment and the consequences that await them when the tale ends.
TIM ROBBINS is a man wrongly convicted of murder and serving a long prison term while MORGAN FREEMAN (who plays the narrator with great dignity) describes himself as "the only guilty man in Shawshank." The hardships of prison life are captured in brief scenes that make the viewer wish that Robbins will find a way of escape.
Along the way, he is gang raped by prisoners and treated harshly by a brutal warden and some of his spirit seems to vanish. But Robbins is quietly effective as a prisoner who makes a good adjustment when he takes charge of the prison library and sees to it that there's a wider selection of books than the kind of potboilers that King is noted for writing. A touch of irony here, no? The closing scenes are a bit of a stretch and a reminder of just who wrote this prison tale--but still, they make an impact because of all that happens before.
It's a bittersweet story, a sort of horrific fairy-tale of what might have happened, but the viewer will be caught up in the story because of the tremendously skillful story-telling magic of Stephen King and director Frank Darabont who also wrote the screenplay.