Hope and possibility
#22 - 'The Shawshank Redemption'
Since 2008, The Shawshank Redemption has been the top-rated film by users of IMDb. It supplanted The Godfather - a film of, I would argue, far more outsized cultural acclaim - at the top, and there it has remained for more than a decade. I mention this not just because the IMDb Top 250 was part of the way I drew up the list for this series, but because I find it intensely fascinating in its own right.
When you put the question “what is the greatest movie of all-time?” to people on the Internet’s most famous film website, the answer you get back is … The Shawshank Redemption.
It’s not an unreasonable extrapolation to guess that if you crowdsourced the same question with passersby on any busy street in any American city today, this film would be the most common answer. Let’s reduce this fact down just one more time: The Shawshank Redemption is - very probably - the greatest movie of all-time according to people alive today.
It is a great movie, to be sure.
Part of me - perhaps it is the effete cinephile part, dear reader - can’t quite wrap my head around the fact that it is this movie for the common man, and also that it has been this movie for this long.
To be surprised that it is The Shawshank Redemption and not The Godfather or Star Wars or The Dark Knight is to miss the subtle charms of the film itself and the clear mass appeal of those charms. Put more harshly, it is too think too little of the tastes of the common man.
Viewing it again, it is, in fact, quite easy to see why Shawshank has risen to its lofty position even though it does not tell an epic tale or wow you visually or possess an indelible star in a heroic role or even a famous director at the top of his game (all apologies, Frank Darabont).
At its core, The Shawshank Redemption appeals to what we all want to believe is the best of humanity. It is about justice, perseverance, friendship, and the power and interrelatedness of that trio of forces. It resonates not because those things are intrinsically good. If that were the case, many films would enjoy a similar reputation. Rather, it touches such a nerve because it presents each of those things as inherently hard - as tantalizingly out of reach much more often than they are within your grasp.
The relationship between Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) and Ellis “Red” Redding (Morgan Freeman) is the vehicle for all of this. Immediately, things look bad for Andy. The film makes this clear as he drunkenly dumps bullets on the ground outside the house where his wife and her lover, soon to be gunned down, are shacked up. But it also quickly doubles back in the next scene with his defiant denial that he murdered the pair at his own trial. We know all we need to know about Andy for the rest of the film. Things look bad for him, and he will simply not accept it.
So it goes when he arrives at Shawshank State Prison after his conviction. He is exposed to brutal prison guards, including the unforgettable Clancy Brown as Captain Hadley, and an icily corrupt warden. He is repeatedly beaten and raped by some of his fellow inmates. Others, Red included, are simply dismissive of his perceived aloofness, a function of both his white-collar background and his unusual determination not to accept his own circumstances. No one else at Shawshank thinks the way he does. Soon enough, he will surely give up.
But Andy, as Red gradually admits via his narration, starts to wear off on people. He wins friends when he daringly secures three beers apiece for inmates on a work detail by offering tax consultation to Hadley in exchange. As the rest of the men sip their suds, Andy sits apart, basking in a setting summer sun with a knowing smile on his face. Visually, this is a rare yellow-golden moment from the great cinematographer Roger Deakins in a film that is filled with muted hues of blue and gray and brown. Prison is as bleak a place as you can imagine. Both its brutality and its monotony - not much really happens for much of the film - are perfect foils for Andy’s bottomless well of determination.
He seems to know and is unwilling to forget a secret that a long prison sentence seems designed to beat out of everyone else - even Red.
“There are places in the world that aren’t made of stone,” Andy tells Red. “There are parts of you they can’t touch.”
The real magic of The Shawshank Redemption is in recognizing how unusual Andy’s sentiment is given his daily circumstances. Red is there as a vital lifeline of friendship for the hero of the story. But he is also there to give voice to the doubt that you, the viewer, are likely to experience. Andy eventually makes his way out of prison and on to an ethereal, sunny beach far, far away from where his life has gone wrong. Darabont and Deakins and even Freeman, who narrates the escape, seem to revel in revealing how he got out. But the thing you can’t shake as a viewer once you know how is not whether you could have crawled through a mile of sewage to be free, but whether you would have had the courage to keep going and hoping and believing for all those years. Most of us, I suspect, could have “crawled to freedom through five hundred yards of shit smelling foulness.” It’s everything before that, I’m not sure I, or you, could make it through.
I suspect this is the heart of Shawshank’s power. It offers hope and possibility. It shows the outer bounds of the human spirit and how it can triumph. It gives you philosophies to live by like “get busy living, or get busy dying.” But it does so without sugarcoating these things. It does not tell its viewer the convenient lie that anyone is capable of such resolve - that Andy’s circumstances wouldn’t break most people, yourself included.
The Shawshank Redemption offers hope and possibility while at the same time leveling with us about, well, life and how hard it can be. Of course that kind of message resonates just as much as a dazzling lightsaber battle. It is something we all need to hear from time to time.