THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION
A film review by Eric Mankin
Copyright 1994 Eric Mankin
Well-crafted, well-acted, and utterly bogus, Frank Darabont's feel-good prison movie represents a creepy height of denial, escapism and easy sentimentality, dodging every real issue of crime and punishment with a hopelessly gimmicky, shamelessly manipulative story.
Read a paper and see how an epidemic of underclass neglect and crime has produced a boom in prison construction, an army of brown and black prisoners, and a profusion of elect-me-I'll-lock-em-up crime bills. Comes now a movie (adapted from a Stephen King novella) from another, simpler planet.
Set between the forties and the sixties, its protagonist is a banker named Andy Defresne (Tim Robbins), unjustly (he says) accused of killing his wife and her lover, who befriends the voice-over narrator Red (Morgan Freeman, doing a Mr. Bojangles turn), one of the two or three non-white men in a gangless, generic New England joint called Shawshank.
Conflict is provided by three tediously one-note heavies whose parts have been written with magic marker: a brutal stinker of a guard captain (Clancy Brown) a hypocritical stinker of a warden (Bob Gunton), and a sexually assaultive stinker of a prisoner. Our hearts go in the warmer as we watch the cultured, plucky Defresne win the hearts and minds of his benighted fellow inmates by improving the library or, in one sequence broadcasting a Mozart duet on the PA while Freeman's voice tells us, voice-over, just how moving it is.
The denouement is a "surprise" that is telegraphed, faxed, mailed, messengered and smoke-signaled at least an hour in advance; one that is so thunderingly obvious that even the most guarded reference would give it away. The film does have the virtue of putting the wonderful James Whitmore (playing an old con) back in front of the camera; one of many excellent performances in the film: that's not enough.
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews