Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

There are two things this movie is famous for: the tunnel escape from the end of the movie, and Morgan Freeman’s distinctive narration. I want to say this is the movie that cemented Freeman’s reputation as an actor but I’d have to study his filmography more to say for sure.

Freeman’s role is so large in the popular consciousness that I couldn’t even tell you who the guy he’s narrating about is played by.

After watching the movie:

Andy Dufresne, a finance man, found out his wife was having an affair, had an argument with her, and when she left, waited outside the county club for her and her lover with a revolver and a bottle of liquor. The next day, his wife and her lover were found dead in the other man’s bed with eight shots from a revolver. An open and shut case despite his insistence of innocence, Andy is sentenced to two consecutive life sentences in Shawshank Prison. Shawshank is a brutal place where the men are abused by the guards and assaulted by fellow prisoners, and the warden doesn’t care as long as he can skim from the prison budget and preach hellfire to the inmates. Even with the tight control exerted over everyone, there’s always someone who can get you anything, and that’s Red, on 20 years of a life sentence. Red notices that Andy somehow isn’t letting this life touch him. After a few years, Andy gets an opportunity to show his bookkeeping skills to help a guard exploit a tax loophole and suddenly every guard needs Andy’s free financial services, which he gets transferred from laundry to the “library” (an old closet with a couple dozen books) in order to have time to work on, and soon the warden has him cooking the books for him too. Andy is able to use the special privileges this earns him to improve the lives of all the prisoners at Shawshank, and makes expanding and enriching the library with grants and donations a major project, even tutoring the men in studying for their high school degrees. One day, twenty years into Andy’s sentence, a transferred prisoner who learns Andy’s story and reveals that he used to have a roommate who once told him he committed an identical double murder and the husband took the fall. This testimony opens the opportunity for an appeal to Andy, but he’s too essential to the warden’s operation to ever be allowed to leave. Meanwhile, as Red approaches 40 years in prison, he begins to realize he’s been in so long he’s unlikely to make it on the outside if he ever gets a parole.

I’m not too surprised that so much of this is a vehicle for illustrating the brutality of the prison system. I am surprised that it spans 20 years. I always thought that Andy escaped in the course of a few months, but then if it was easy enough to tunnel out in a few months, a lot more people would do it. I also didn’t expect it to be about a guy who is so committed to not letting it get him down thanks to the protection of knowing he doesn’t belong there that he drags his fellow prisoners up with him and teaches them hope and dignity. But my biggest failure of imagination is that when I think of a prison I think of a brutalist slab of concrete and I was taken aback by Shawshank itself being a relatively pretty building on the outside, kind of an industrial era fortress. But then that kind of design I was thinking of wasn’t being built until during and after the events of the story.

I was getting ready to praise the makeup, wardrobe design, and performances for doing so much to sell that decades have gone by, and that is a really effective illusion, but only while they’re wearing long sleeve shirts. A few times at the end once they’re out of prison uniforms we see Andy and Red with short sleeves, no sleeves, or no shirts, and I saw no attempt to disguise that they have young men’s upper bodies. It’s surprising that they put in such seamless work on their faces and possibly hands and then didn’t touch any other skin, but I suppose it’s not as well understood how to age arms and torsos.

Robbins turns in a fine performance here, especially in selling being an older man completely over the upside down world of the prison, but there’s no doubt that the true shining light here is Morgan Freeman, a world wise middle aged man aging into a world weary older man finally wise enough to demonstrate reform, yet still with so much to learn from the man he helped to acclimate to prison life who never let it define him. I must have seen the warden before but the name is unfamiliar. He doesn’t have a whole lot of texture to work with and is just about as evil as you can be while putting forward a respectable face rather than cartoon villainy, but there are occasional flashes of nuance. The rest are much more supporting roles. Many of them stay the same over the years but they seem fairly interchangeable. It’s mostly just the relationship between Andy and Red and everyone else basically just fills out the requirements of the plot.

I feel this gets built up as a life-changing inspirational movie, and if that’s so, it’s overblown. What it is is a film that seems to accomplish everything it sets out to do, in painting a stark picture of the injustice of our justice system and showing the ingenuity and persistence that can slowly make positive change both externally and internally. It can seem naive to pin it all on hope, but hope is an essential part of having that persistence to keep chipping away at the systems that oppress.