THE INDISPENSIBLES – #11: THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION
We do deride the Academy Awards and they do get it wrong more often then they get it right – I mean, Titanic is a better film than LA Confidential? Russell Crowe is a better actor in A Beautiful Mind than Kurt Russell in Dark Blue? Crash was the Best Picture of 2005, when standing beside it is Munich, Good Night & Good Luck and Brokeback Mountain? Come on – no way!
But once, just once, we have to thank the Academy. Because without them recognising the brilliance that was The Shawshank Redemption despite it falling at the first hurdle, then it’s highly likely the film would have been buried within a month after its release.
Yeah it would have been ‘found’ and a ‘cult’ would have no doubt formed around it, but without Academy recognition Frank Darabont’s masterpiece would have just gone the way that Stranger Than Fiction has recently – a genuine classic that not enough people know is actually out there!
The Shawshank Redemption premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September 1994, and opened a few weeks later. It got good reviews, some in fact excellent, but did poor business (its $18 million original gross didn’t cover costs) and was buried as quickly as possible. Only a few random art house cinemas kept hold of prints and showed screenings with any sense of regularity. However, when the Academy Award nominations were announced and the film had garnered seven, including best picture, people began to sit up and take notice.
Admittedly there wasn’t much going for the film: It had a (according to some) “terrible” title that people (fair enough, ‘American’ people!) struggled to pronounce, it was a “prison drama” and “statistically” women don’t like those types of movies “allegedly”, it contained almost no action, it starred actors who were enormously respected but not big stars known to be able to “open” a movie (at that time!), and it was long at 142 minutes – which is “short” in comparison to movies of the last few years. Ok, so Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump were “long” movies too but “hype” killed off any sense of either of those films being considered ‘overly-epic’. The Shawshank Redemption wore its disadvantages around its proverbial neck like a concrete necklace!
This was a movie that needed strong word-of-mouth to find an audience, and indeed business was slowly but steadily growing (following it’s Oscar Nominations, the film increased it’s intake by another $10 million) when it was pulled out of the cinemas. If it had been left to find its way, it might have continued to build and run for months like *shudder* Mamma Mia. But that’s not what happened:
Instead, in one of the most remarkable stories in home entertainment history, it found its real mass audience on VHS tapes and laser discs, and through the invention of DVDs. Within five years of its release, it was a phenomenon; a video best seller and renter that its admirers feel they’ve ‘discovered’ for themselves unlike the likes of Pulp or Gump where they were told from the offset that these were “classics”. When the Wall Street Journal ran an article about The Shawshank Redemption phenomena in April 1999, it was occupying first place in the Internet Movie Database worldwide vote of the 250 best films of all time; these days it is occasionally usurped but usually resides somewhere in the top five.
In mid-1940s Maine, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) is a mild mannered banker wrongly convicted of the murder of his wife and her lover, and sentenced to life imprisonment at The Shawshank Prison. There he meets a friendly lifer called Ellis Boyd ‘Red’ Redding (Morgan Freeman) who is the prison “fixer” as well as being notorious for continual refusal of parole. Andy asks for only two things from Red; a small rock hammer, so he can still pursue his hobby of geology within the confines of prison, and a poster of Rita Hayworth. The friendship blossoms between the two opposites over many, many years – in the face of violence, degradation and corruption by the Warden (Bob Gunton) and Captain Hadley (Clancy Brown) his psychotic head guard – until one day Andy just isn’t around anymore…
What’s unique about The Shawshank Redemption is that it is a film with a clear protagonist, Andy Dufresne, steered by almost constant, if not regular, narration and yet the action is never seen from the protagonist’s point of view and the narration is not under his control either. From Andy’s arrival on the prison bus to the film’s end, we see only how others see him – Red, who becomes his best friend, Brooks the old librarian, the corrupt Warden Norton, guards and prisoners. Red is our narrator and we soon start to realise that Darabont presents him as our surrogate. We don’t follow the archetypal protagonist the typical, conventional way. We follow him through Red’s eyes. Eventually we come to understand that the film is not about its hero, but about our relationship with him – our curiosity, our pity, our admiration.
We constantly question Andy. And, if we’d been walking in his shoes, so to speak, then our questions would pose themselves and find instant satisfactory answers. But we’re not. We’re looking at Andy’s life through Red’s story-telling of it. As a result, we question away but will not be given the answers until Red wants us to – Did he really kill those two people? Why does he keep so much to himself?
By the movie’s end, with all questions answered, there is a sense of warmth, joy and just utter satisfaction that you never thought a movie capable of instilling in you.
Frank Darabont wrote and directed the film, basing it on a story by Stephen King. King operates a scheme for aspiring film-makers whereby if you are a first time director or writer looking for your break via an adaptation of one of the renowned author’s pieces of works, then he will sign over the rights to you for the princely sum of only $1. Darabont was afforded such a luxury by presenting King with initial drafts of the adaptation of his short story to prove how serious he was about the film.
Darabont constructs the film to observe the story, not to punch it up or upstage it. Upstaging, in fact, is unknown in this film; the actors are content to stay within their roles. Like prisoners who all just want to blend into the back-ground and not attract the guards attention or stand out, the actors themselves never reach forward and try and ‘steal a scene’ or ‘control a moment’. It’s a rarity in ensemble casts, but when you have a film absolutely littered with acclaimed character and theatre actors like this you would think it would be impossible.
Those directors that make a stone-cold, indisputable masterpiece with their feature directorial debut is few. Regardless of the number of people in the “club”, Frank Darabont is most definitely a member of it.
Watching the film again for this essay, I fell in love with it all over again and saw it as if I was seeing it the first time, back as part of my Sociology class back in 1997. When you’re shown a film in school, your childish resolve kind of makes you fight against it and resent it somewhat, because you’re being told you ‘have’ to watch it. Who didn’t “get nothing” from the Franco Zeffirelli version of Romeo & Juliet, regardless of how gorgeous and sexy Olivia Hussey was as Juliet, because it was forced upon you as part of your GCSE English syllabus?
It’s testament to the magnificence of The Shawshank Redemption that, like One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (another film ‘forced’ upon us Sociology students!), it cannot be “resisted”. It will break down your defences, educate you, captivate you, inspire you and both break and mend your heart.
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7 Responses to “THE INDISPENSIBLES – #11: THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION”
As close to perfection as a movie gets. I was lucky enough to catch it in the cinema and was completely mesmerised by it. Saw it around the same time as I caught Leon and Pulp Fiction on video, and thus my passion for movies was born.
Glad someone else has mentioned that feeling of warmth, joy and satisfatction, or as I kill it the warm-fuzzies! Almost all my favourite movies have left me with a similar, almost indescribable feeling that Shawshank does. Punch-Drunk Love, Eternal Sunshine, Lars and the Real Girl, Beautiful Girls, Stranger than Fiction and most recently Wall-E. They’ve all had me almost in terms at certain scenes, not with tears of joy, or sadness, just scenes of pure empathy, where you’ve been completely been taken over by the stories and the characters. Like the part in Lars when he’s at the party, dancing on his own, his eyes closed and a small smile on his face. Moments that seem so simple but for whatever reason completely draw you in. Shawshank is full of moments like that.
as I call it even, that’s a weird freudian slip, must be having some sub-conscious murder fantasies! Saying that I just watched an episode of Dexer so that probably explains it!\
Surprised Shawshank’s only at no. 11 on your list though, makes me even more curious to see the rest of the list.
Oh, the rest of the list is like my life presently… it’s all ****in downhill from here.
I’m not ashamed to say that this movie give sme goosebumps EVERY SINGLE TIME, and that beautiful end shot always makes me cry. ALWAYS. What a glorious movie.
I have to whole-heartedly concur with what Kristina said, I’m a non-manly whimpering sap the second Red’s “I hope,” monologue starts.
It’s alright.
Read the story a while before watching this, not often a story that good is made into such a great film. Top stuff.
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