The Shawshank Redemption

With the brief window of respite the post-exam holiday is offering me (meaning, just the weekend), I watched The Shawshank Redemption. Most everyone else zipped off right after their last papers to catch Pirates, or Kung Fu Panda 2, or Thor (why did no one watch Insidious?). In the vacuum between now and the time X-Men: First Class comes out, I instead played a 1994 movie for myself.

Everyone should see The Shawshank Redemption.

Shawshank was a total failure at the box office, but Warner Bros. thankfully put it out strong on video, where it finally made its mark. Now it's the highest-rated movie on IMDB - and for good reason. I don't know if it's the greatest film of all time - how can we tell, anyway? I've also watched another No. 1 contender, The Godfather...also great, very different - but it's the kind of film that makes failing your Chemistry paper feel small, and more importantly, fixable.

It's really the simple, bare-bones acting and scripting that gets this 2-hour 15-minute a great hold on your attention. Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins don't do sociopathic, erratic characters, or Magic Negroes, or any other gimmicky role with the right quirk to earn awards. They simply act normal characters - one unlucky, one time-worn.

What's at the heart of this film? A story of hope? Redemption? But whose? Andy and Red don't seem to redeem themselves to me. One was never a criminal to begin with, but became one; the other really was a criminal, but worn by prison. When the film starts Red already seems a good man, and Andy too. They do good deeds and help each other out, they work hard. But what do these things really mean?

Maybe it's being able to pick yourself up from rock bottom. "They send you here for life, and that's exactly what they take". Maybe it's about being able to take your life back. Going further, it could even mean a larger redemption, about setting the system right - it is after all the Shawshank redemption, not the Andy Dufresne Redemption or the Red Redemption. To that end it seems justice becomes a part of that equation. And when that justice plays out you'll cheer.

Half the story is also predictable. You may think someone will die, and you'll likely be right. The lousy movie doesn't care less and shoves at you a recycled, cliched plot. The good movie is original and gives you new things you don't expect. But the best films are organic. 'Organic' means that the film goes naturally, and so rather than be predictable, it makes things inevitable - and sometimes all the more powerful for it. An organic film does not always have a first-act setup, a second-act build and a third-act climax to wrap things up in a nice bow. It's the story of lives that goes along day by day until a point where it just reaches an ending. People making organic films just take the lives with the best stories and best endings and put them to film. This is one of them (it came from a Stephen King novella, though).

That same quality lends it some unpredictability too. No, sudden explosions don't happen, but you don't exactly know what the film is getting at in the end; action films you know will peak with a brawny showdown to take down the antagonist, but natural films just lead you along much like life itself. Quite often it actually does end with taking down an antagonist, because that's the payoff, but it never feels 'put in'. 

That's not to say the film wasn't well-planned, because clearly it was - details the characters mention early in the film resurface later on, inverting the figurative and making it literal, and hypocrisy becomes irony. The little bits and pieces all make sense, and in the end actually does tie up into a nice bow.

Shawshank has strong language and some prison violence, but it also has a Will Smith Inspirational Film style without the Disney dialogue and the actual Will Smith. Andy is a man too clever for prison, and Red is the man who stands himself up not from suffering in prison, but suffering out of it. And really, if you have the time and no money to watch any of the summer flicks on offer now, The Shawshank Redemption is as good a film to watch as a few, and definitely much better than most.