I remember how I once tried to convince a friend to watch this movie. I told him it was based on a Stephen King novella, and he absolutely refused to watch, believing it to be a horror film. It took me almost an hour to convince him that this was anything but, and at the film's end, he was happy that I wore him down because he, like many people I know, came to see this as one of the finest movies ever made. The Shawshank Redemption is set in a prison, but is a story of friendship, morality, and most importantly, hope. The prisoners are, for the most part, good (enough) men while the guards are corrupt and brutal. The deranged prisoners are hated among the rest of the population, and while the incarcerated men are mostly guilty of the crimes they have been imprisoned for, they look out for each other and act more like war buddies in a POW camp than hardened criminals who have to survive prison.
Tim Robbins' Andy Dufresne is a quiet and meek man who has been accused of killing his wife and her lover. He had the motive and definitely contemplated it, but he continually asserted his innocence throughout his trial. He was convicted and sent to Shawshank prison, a punishment the judge found particularly gruesome. When he arrived, he was met by vicious guards, a judgmental and corrupt warden, and a pack of prisoners who spent their time trying to corner Andy in order to rape him. A man like Andy should barely have lasted five minutes in such a hellhole. But there was also Red, played by Morgan Freeman, a likeable convict who was everyone's friend in the prison because he knew how to get things from the outside. Some people wanted cigarettes, while Andy used Red to get him a rock hammer to further his geology hobby while behind bars. Andy and Red became friends, and Andy eventually was welcomed into Red's group of strangely lovable prisoners.
In order to maintain his sanity, Andy took up projects while at Shawshank, which included petitioning the governor to give him funds to improve the prison library, tutoring a young convict who never graduated high school, and, eventually, becoming a crooked accountant at the, um, behest of the warden. Andy pointed out the irony that he was an honest banker in his real life, and that he had to go to prison to become a crook. These projects gave Andy hope that he could still live a somewhat normal life, even behind bars. Red, who narrates the film, often pointed out that Andy never truly became one of the prisoners. The film examined what a life in prison could do to a man, which was most tragically illustrated through the elderly Brooks, who likely made one bad decision in his youth and spent the rest of his life paying for it.
Meanwhile, as we saw the goodness that could exist in the hearts of prisoners, we watched how the appointed watchmen of the prisoners committed crimes far worse than anything Andy or his fellow convicts had ever done. On Andy's first night in Shawshank, the Captain of the Guard beat a man to death for crying. Captain Hadley never passed up an opportunity to show the inmates of Shawshank who held the power; on one occassion, Hadley nearly threw Andy off of a roof for making a comment that Hadley misinterpreted. Warden Norton silently condoned this behavior, and became a man worthy of incarceration himself when he created a scheme that forced the prisoners to act as slave labor for local construction projects. He didn't have to pay his "workers", and was able to underbid every local contractor (that is unless the contractors paid him off to let them get desperately needed work).
I can't delve too deeply into the film's message about the beauty and necessity of hope without giving away the ending (though I think the filmmakers took the path of stating that the journey is more important that the conclusion because of the way the promotional materials pretty much gave away the ending). Basically, the film looked at how the lack of hope made the experience in prison so awful for some, how clinging to hope could make things worse for others, and how acting on hope could make all the difference for the rest.
Speaking of hope,
Up next: Almost hopeless...
No comments:
Post a Comment