The Shawshank Redemption is not the greatest film ever made. Heck, it’s not even one of best films of 1994 – the year of Pulp Fiction, Hoop Dreams, Chungking Express, Exotica, Quiz Show and the last two entries in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy. And yet it continues to sit at or near the top of IMDb’s top 250, currently a shade above The Godfather and The Dark Knight, despite opening to polite reviews, middling box office and a resurgent Oscar campaign that nonetheless yielded zero awards. That’s an incredible comeback story, a video-and-cable-fueled long game as steady and methodical as, say, spending two decades chipping a hole in the prison walls with a rock hammer.
Much of the film’s standing in a site like the IMDb has to do with mass consensus, in this case about 3 million voters rallying around a drama that’s broadly loved, which would not happen for a film like the recent Sight & Sound critic’s poll winner Jeanne Dielman, a 200-minute temporal experiment that appeals to a narrower subset of viewers. Yet plenty of acclaimed studio movies are aimed at the largest audience possible, so it’s significant that The Shawshank Redemption still speaks profoundly to so many people 30 years later. There are any number of obvious reasons for that, starting with a Morgan Freeman performance that uses his serene gravitas as much for storytelling as it does for soulful character work.
Yet writer-director Frank Darabont, working from the Stephen King novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, has made an old-fashioned prison drama that stealthily – and, at times, shamelessly – evolves into a jailbreak movie in both the spiritual and literal sense of the term. It grips you first as an uplifting lesson in how to break free of earthly confinements before angling toward an even happier ending, one that rewards the ingenuity of its inmate heroes while giving the bad guys their just deserts. That’s Hollywood, perhaps, but there’s a depth of feeling to The Shawshank Redemption that’s well-earned, tied to a central friendship that spans decades and grows through resistance, like green shoots through cracks in the prison yard.
Banker Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) is sentenced to two consecutive life sentences for murdering his wife and her lover, and the judge condemns him for his cold calculation during trial. It turns out only the latter part is true. When Andy arrives at Shawshank state prison in 1947, the roughnecks who populate the place, especially Ellis “Red” Redding, assume this reedy, white-collar man will crack, but prison just sharpens his resolve. Told that Red is a go-to source for contraband, Andy orders a rock hammer and a large poster of Rita Hayworth, which seems to indicate an uncommon passion for geology and a common passion for bombshells. Yet Red quickly comes to appreciate Andy’s resilience in the face of repeated sexual assaults and his persistence in making prison better for himself and the men around him.
Andy and Red also share a gift for finding the angles, whether through Red’s sophisticated contraband operation or Andy’s shrewdly leveraging his accounting skills to win three cold beers apiece for his buddies after a day of hard labor. When the Bible-thumping warden (Bob Gunton) starts exploiting prison workers for fat contracts and kickbacks on the outside, he brings in Andy to cook the books, which earns him and his friends more favorable treatment but poses the obvious risk of making him an important cog to an huge, illegal operation. He gets the resources for his pet project to expand the prison library, but unusually terrible hardships lurk around the corner.
“Get busy living or get busy dying” is one quotable line from The Shawshank Redemption. “There are places in this world that aren’t made out of stone” is another. At times the film can seem like the foundation of a new religious movement, with Andy as the quietly confident philosophizer telling his fellow inmates – and his captives in the audience – about an inner spirit that transcends the cruel uncertainty of the outside world. This is how he survives a gang of prison rapists or a month in solitary confinement, and it’s how you can survive the setbacks and disappointments of everyday life. It’s right there on the movie poster: “Hope can set you free.”
A more tough-minded film might have stopped there. After all, the likeliest outcome for both Andy and Red is that they serve their sentences in full and become institutionalized like their elderly friend Brooks who doesn’t know how to handle parole after 50 years. What’s the point of nurturing “something inside” the warden and his thugs can’t touch if achieving actual freedom becomes a possibility? That might give The Shawshank Redemption a more satisfying, A+ CinemaScore payoff but minimizes the power of guys like Andy and Red learning to define hope and liberation from behind cold iron bars.
Still, it’s hard to deny the rousing satisfaction of the film’s payoff or the deft chiseling of the plot and characterization that make it possible. Even in 1994, mainstream productions with the sturdy craft of The Shawshank Redemption were getting more difficult to find, and they’re virtually impossible three decades later, when mid-budgeted period pieces are stuck in no man’s land. There haven’t been many films since with a kinship quite as affecting as that between Andy and Red, who strive to make the best of a bad situation, which is what friends often have to do for each other. What they don’t have is a writer to make the situation go away.
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