IMDB Top 250: - Day 5: #1 - The Shawshank Redemption
Image taken from MovieGoods.
I'm going to be honest here: I had absolutely no idea what to expect from this movie. I'd never seen it before, but my parents gave it tons of praise, it's the #1 movie on this list, it has one of my favorite actors in it (Morgan Freeman), and it comes from what seems to have been one of the greatest years for movies. Seriously, 1994 is like this vein of great movies, of which a significant number are on the IMDB Top 250. The Shawshank Redemption is based on a Stephen King novella. You know, I'm starting to notice a trend here: lots of great movies are adaptations of books, aren't they? Anyway, standard SPOILER WARNING goes here.
Image taken from Sucker Punch Cinema.
In 1947, a banker by the name of Andy Dufrese (Tim Robbins) is accused and convicted of killing his wife and her lover through circumstantial evidence and is sent to Shawshank State Penitentiary for two back to back life sentences. There he meets the Warden (Bob Gunton) and quickly befriends fellow inmate "Red" (Morgan Freeman), a man who can get things into the prison from the outside. Andy asks for a rock hammer to continue his hobby of collecting rocks.
Andy is put on outdoor duty where he, Red, and some of the other inmates are retarring the roof of a building when he overhears the Captain of the prison guard (Clancy Brown) complaining about taxes. Andy offers some financial advice to the Captain in exchange for beers for his fellow inmates. After the incident, Andy is reassigned to work with the aging librarian inmate, Brooks (James Whitmore), as a pretext for Andy to secretly give financial advice and do the taxes of all the prison guards in the compound. Brooks, who has been in the prison for 50 years is eventually released on parole, but can't take the pressures of life on the outside and hangs himself.
The Warden realizes that he can undercut manual labor by using the inmates as a labor force and accepts kick-backs to not take certain projects. Andy launders the money in exchange for a private cell and maintenance of the library, which he eventually expands and dedicates to Brooks. One of the donations to the library is a record of The Marriage of Figaro, which Andy plays over the sound system so that the inmates get a moment of peace. Andy gets thrown into solitary for the stunt.
Tony Williams (Gil Bellows) arrives at Shawshank in 1965 for robbery. He joins Andy and Red's circle and Andy helps him get his GED. Tony, having been in and out of prisons for the past several years, remembers one inmate in particular at his last prison. The inmate bragged that he committed a double murder of a woman and her lover that sounds suspiciously like what Andy is in the prison for and tells Andy, who tells the warden that he could be set free if Tony testified in court. The Warden, not wanting his money launderer out of the prison, has Tony killed after confirming the story.
Andy tells Red of his dream to live in a little town on the Pacific coast in Mexico. He also instructs Red that if he ever gets out of the prison, that he should look for a field with a lone oak tree near Buxton to receive a package. Andy does not show up at roll call the next morning and it is discovered that Andy has escaped the prison. For the past 19 years, Andy had been digging through walls with his rock hammer and crawled through the sewage system for five miles to freedom in the rain. While the Warden and guard are looking for him, Andy withdraws all of the Warden's laundered money and leaves evidence of what the Warden has been doing, which he took with him before he left. The Captain of the prison guard is arrested and the Warden shoots himself in the head before he can be arrested as well.
Red is eventually released on parole after serving his sentence for 40 years. It appears that he's going the way of Brooks until he remembers the promise he made to Andy to get the package in Buxton. He finds it under an obsidian rock and in it is a cache of money and a letter from Andy, advising Red to join him in Mexico. Red takes his advice and breaks parole to meet Andy in Mexico, with the movie ending as Red and Andy meet again on the shore.
Image from Free Celebrity Graphics.
This review took me longer than they usually do (two weeks) because I really didn't know what to write. The movie is so tightly plotted that it was very hard for me to discern what was important and what wasn't, but that doesn't stop the fact that I really like this movie. I don't know if it deserves the number 1 slot on the IMDB Top 250, but I can understand why it's there. The fact that this film didn't win any awards because of Forrest Gump is a crime, because Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman are absolutely amazing in this film. I've never seen a movie with Robbins in it before (or if I have I don't remember it), but this is easily the best thing I've seen Freeman in and pretty much cements my opinion that he's quite possibly the greatest actor of the modern era, if not at least one of them. In short, if you haven't seen this movie, WATCH IT. WATCH IT NOW. You're doing yourself a disservice by not seeing this film.
Next time: Malon Brando's going to make you an offer you can't refuse.