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Mason Verger -> RE: The Shawshank Redemption (29/12/2007 4:32:37 PM)
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From Uncut magazine:
Sacred Cows
Reputations reassessed: The Reaper reads his charge sheet on everyone's favourite prison buddy movie
Based on Stephen King's novella, Rita Hayworth And The Shawshank Redemption, this appallingly entitled movie was initially faintly praised by critics. Roger Ebert gave it a polite three-and-a-half stars, others lazily regurgitated the production notes about the triumph of the human spirit. At 142 minutes, it did mediocre business at the box office.
It stars Tim Robbins as Andy Dufresne, a young New England banker imprisoned for murdering his wife. His opening years in Shawshank are made more harrowing by a series of sexual assaults. However, he keeps his spirits afloat through his friendship with prison fixer Red (Morgan Freeman). He also falls in with Bob Gunton's corrupt warden, whom he helps operate a financial scam. However, the warden turns against him when Dufresne finds a fellow inmate who can prove he was jailed unjustly. All this time, however, Dufresne has been planning his escape, chipping away for 20 years at his cell wall with a tiny rock hammer until finally...
Shawshank took on a gigantic afterlife on video, doing extraordinary business by word of mouth, going down great not just among Bridges Of Madison County-reading types but the sort of hard-bitten cineaste cynics often vulnerable to cheap sentimentalism. The Duchess Of York liked it too. By 1999 it was topping all-time greatest list polls-it was Number Three in Channel Four's Top 100 movies.
What was once regarded a respectable but ponderous vehicle for Robbins' wobbly bottom lip is now hailed as a milestone- as opposed to the long, self-important, po-faced streak of excruciatingly contrived, suffocatingly trite nonsense it is.
One of Shawshank's great masterstrokes is supposedly the casting of Freeman as narrator Red (an Irishman in the novella). However, the casting reveals director Frank Darabont's insidiously quaint attitude towards 'blackness', more fully revealed in The Green Mile, his derided follow-up. The casting of Freeman isn't political correctness but intended to add a folksy, Uncle Remus-style warmth by associaton to Dufresne, who otherwise would be exposed for the cold, calculating, remote white fish he is. Freeman doesn't break into a chorus of "Zippedeedoodah", but if often sounds like he's about to.
The fuzzy illogic extends to the prison community. Shawshank apologists claim the film is partly an indictment of the evils of incarceration, yet the inmates Robbins is surrounded by must be vindication for the nasty warden's methods, because a more amiable, mild-mannered bunch you could not hope to meet (the homosexuals excepted, of course). As lifers they must have committed terrible deeds, but judging by their on-screen behaviour they could slide meekly back into society tomorrow. When Dufresne broadcasts Mozart to the prison yard, they stand stock still in appreciation, rather then yell "Someone turn that fuckin' fairy-ass music off" like you imagine some jailbirds might. Morever, this being a US prison in the Forties/Fifties, their lack of racism, lack of knowledge that racism exists, does them extraordinary credit.
Shawshank is a world unto itself, where in 20 years no one seems to age more than six months, where Dufresne can describe a field as" like something from a Robert Frost poem" and rely on his fellow con knowing what he's talking about, where you can escape through a hole in your cell wall and somehow tack back the poster that concealed it for several years neatly in place behind you.
Dufresne's escape is far less a monument to hope than to the belief-beggaring negligence of Shawshank authorities. I've seen more convincing prison breaks in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Yet this is the catalytic event upon which the film's supposedly immortal quotes hang -"Get busy living or get busy dying" or "Fear can hold you prisoner-hope can set you free", lines so banal they insult even the intelligence of middle America. With it's lachymorose soundtrack, grandiose manipulation (culminating in Robbins' Christ-like pose when he escapes) and utter disregard for the rules and limitations of the world we live in, Shawshank is an especially crass piece of Hollywood hokum whose slowness has been mistaken for gravitas, its sentimentality for sublimity. A sequel, Shawhank 2: This Time No Fucking Around, He Gets The Chair, might redeem matters, however...
The Reaper
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