Man, 1994 was a really great year.
Plot summary (with spoilers): Red, a prisoner at the Shawshank State Penitentiary, would like to tell you a story about a man who came to the prison one day in 1947. That man is Andy Durfresne. (Pronounced just like it's spelled). He was convicted of double homicide. His wife was cheating on him with another man, and he went to the man's house with a gun and some bourbon, to "confront" them both. He waited for a long while, and they didn't show, so eventually he sobered up and drove home, ditching the gun into a river. Later that night, someone came along and killed his wife and the other man. The D.A. didn't believe Andy's story and found it awfully convenient that they can't find Andy's gun and confirm whether or not it had been fired that night. Andy found this awfully inconvenient. He got sent to Shawshank.
Red thought very little of Andy at first, and bet that he would be the first to "break" on his first night in the cell. Another prisoner named Heywood bet that Fat Ass would be the first to break, and whispered threats through the prison bars until Fat Ass burst out sobbing. Enter Captain Hadley, the leader of the guards. He beat the shit out of Fat Ass for refusing to stop crying. The next day, Heywood collected cigarettes from the others, but learned that Fat Ass died in the infirmary the night before. Red lost the most cigarettes because he bet against Andy, and that was the last time he ever did that.
After about a month, Andy approached Red in the yard and said he heard that Red could procure things for people who needed them. Red asked what he wanted. Just a little rock hammer, to help him carve rocks. Red asked if he was going to use the hammer to dig his way to freedom. Andy laughed and said when he sees the hammer, he'll feel silly saying that.
The hammer was a tiny little thing, and Red did indeed laugh. He estimated it would take 600 years to tunnel out of Shawshank with that.
So that summer, Andy, Red, and his friends were drafted to re-tar the roof of the prison, and while up there, they overheard Captain Hadley tell some of the other guards about an inheritance he received and how upset he was about how much it will be taxed. Andy approached Hadley and opened with "how much do you trust your wife?", which was perhaps the dumbest way to start that conversation, and Hadley responded by nearly throwing Andy off the roof. He breathlessly clarified that he, Hadley, could give the inheritance to his wife tax-free. He agreed to show Hadley how to do it, in exchange for three beers each for him and his friends.
In the meantime, an inmate named Boggs and his buddies known as The Sisters, began raping and beating Andy on a regular basis. They once beat him so badly, he wound up in the infirmary for a month. However, Andy became important to Hadley, so Hadley beat Boggs so that he could never walk again, and had to drink through a straw. The Sisters didn't bother Andy after that.
Once Andy got out of the infirmary, Red surprised him with a picture of Rita Hayworth, which he hung on his cell wall. The Warden Norton heard about Andy helping Hadley and enlisted him to help other guards with their tax issues. Andy got transferred to work in the library with Old Man Brooks in order to facilitate this easily. Andy decided that the library needed to be expanded, and wrote a letter once a week to Congress in order to get funding. In the meantime, he helped the Warden launder money using a fake identity named Randal Stevens. He enjoyed the irony that he never broke the law until he went to prison. After six years of letters, the government finally broke and supplied the prison with a fancy new library. They also sent records. Left alone in the office one day, Andy locked himself in and played a record on the player, and used the prison sound system to broadcast it to the whole yard. He got two weeks in solitary for the tiny moment of humanity it afforded him. He thought the trade was worth it.
In the 1950's, Brooks was released on parole. He only lasted a few weeks on the outside before killing himself. Red declared that he had been "institutionalized", meaning he couldn't survive without the prison walls around him. Every man took the implications of that horrifying thought in.
In 1965, nineteen years after Andy first went to jail, an inmate named Tommy Williams showed up. Tommy was a young kid with hip Elvis sideburns and something in Andy inspired Tommy to try to improve his life. He asked for help in getting his High School equivalency, and after some time, Andy taught him enough to take the test. Then Tommy asked Red what Andy was in jail for, anyway, and Red told him he was in for killing his wife and some golf pro. A stunned Tommy then told both Andy and Red about the time he was in another prison, where his cellmate admitted to killing a golf pro who owed him some money, and the woman he was seeing happened to get it, too. And the best part, according the man, was that they pinned it on some banker!
A breathless Andy went to the warden to plead with him to set in motion a request for a new trial. The Warden was skeptical of Tommy's tale (which in no way would be enough evidence, in reality) and Andy countered that they could at least investigate the man who made the confession. The Warden pooh-poohed all of Andy's suggestions, and then Andy made the mistake of assuring him that he would never tell anyone about the money-laundering they both had done. The Warden lost his shit at that, and threw Andy in solitary for a month.
In the meantime, he called Tommy out to the yard for a chat. He asked Tommy if he was absolutely sure of the other con man's confession, and if he would be willing to testify in court. Tommy nodded eagerly, and said on a stack of bibles! The Warden shook his head sadly, looked upwards at the watchtower, and nodded. He walked away. Tommy looked up at the tower, and Captain Hadley put four bullets in his chest.
The Warden went to Andy and explained regretfully that Tommy was shot while trying to escape. Andy said he wouldn't help the Warden anymore, but the Warden threatened to put him down in the general population with the rapist sodomites, and also tear down the library, which really seems like the lesser of the two threats.
Andy finally got out of solitary and spoke to Red, looking despondent and broken. He asked Red to do something for him if he ever got out. Go to a town called Baxter and find the oak tree by the hayloft where Old Mrs. Krabappel used to watch the sunset while crocheting American flags (or something like that) and there he'll find a rock that shouldn't be there, and buried underneath the rock will be...something. Red agrees to do this. Andy tells Red that if he ever got free--which would be impossible, since he doesn't have the possibility of parole of course--that he would spend the rest of his days in a little Mexican town called Zihuatanejo (again, just as it's spelled). That night, Heywood told Red that Andy borrowed some rope from the library. Red feared the worst.
Andy finished up his bookkeeping business with The Warden, and the Warden told Andy to shine his shoes before going back to his cell that night. Andy nodded.
The next day, Andy didn't come out of his cell for roll call. Red panicked. The guard went into the cell and...
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN HE'S NOT THERE?!"
The Warden and Captain Handley stood in Andy's empty cell. They questioned Red, who of course knew nothing. Angrily, the Warden threw some of Andy's rocks at the poster on the wall. The rock went through the poster and fell a long way down the other side. Stunned, the Warden ripped off the poster and revealed a giant hole. It didn't take 600 years. Only 20.
Andy had it all planned. He took one of the Warden's suits, and kept it in a plastic bag. He tunneled to the sewer pipe and then crawled along for half a mile in the shit and sludge until he reached the other side. Freedom. Freedom and rain, to wash away the shit and sin. He had fashioned a fake birth certificate and social security card for "Randal Stevens", and used it to make withdrawls from several banks, taking 350 thousand dollars of the Warden's money. He then sent copies of his shady financial dealings to the press, who broke the story and had Captain Handley arrested. They came for the Warden, too, but the coward put a bullet in his brain first.
So now, Red sits at another parole board hearing, 40 years after his initial crime. The parole officer boredly asks him if he's redeemed, if he's no longer a threat to society. Red goes into his usual shtick, but then grows tired. He says he's done begging and he knows the parole officer will just reject him, anyway, and he doesn't care anymore. This...works somehow. Perhaps the parole officer has daddy issues and responds negatively to rejection. Red tries the parole route, gets tired of it quickly, brakes parole, and somehow finds the rock in Baxter. Buried down deep is a note from Andy and a wad of cash. "If you ever get out and find this, meet me in that city we talked about". Red takes the money and buys a bus ticket. He hopes he'll make it to Zihuatanejo without incident.
And so he does. He strolls up to Andy on the beach, grinning ear to ear. And their story is just beginning.
Review: I saw this for the first time about a year ago and of course it's beautiful. In these days of moral ambiguities and anti-heroes, it's refreshing and very Stephen King-like to have a story with a complete hero to root for and a complete villain to root against, and Tim Robbins here plays the part to perfection. There's very little to complain about, here. The acting is uniformly great, the writing too. The movie is only two hours twenty minutes long, but it feels much longer (in a good way), because chronologically, it spans such a great deal of time and we feel those twenty years, every day of them. We watch our friends the prisoners grow up and change and evolve. It's amazing too, that never do we get a chyron that says "Ten years later" or anything like that. The years go by simply because they must, and the story takes exactly this long to tell. I also appreciated that for much of the movie, the Warden and the Captain are bad guys, sure, but the movie doesn't let us in on the fact that they're truly monsters until the final third, when they murder Tommy. That of course propels Andy into action and begins the final act, where we're begging for Andy to get revenge somehow, but don't see how it's possible. The trick of the poster was brilliant, and the shot of Red, the Warden, and Hadley all peering into the hole, dumbstruck, is one of the finest shots in cinema. And of course it's not enough that Andy merely escapes and embarrasses the Warden, he must expose him as a fraud and a crook, too. Our thirst for revenge is throughly quenched.
Also, I haven't read the book, but apparently originally Red was an Irishman (there's even a winking joke in the movie about it, meta before meta was cool) and Frank Darabount looked at a half dozen white celebrities before finally deciding on Morgan Freeman. That set up a cool dynamic that's rarely seen in the movies. Usually it's the black character who is saintly and other-worldy and always winds up teaching the white character some important Life Lessons. And however PC and earnest and well-intentioned that instinct is, it nearly always comes off as patronizing (see Radio, The Legend of Bagger Vance, etc). It was neat to see the reverse, here.
Stars: Five out of five. Let's see, 1994 brought us Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, The Shawshank Redemption, Quiz Show, The Lion King, Speed, Bullets Over Broadway, Reality Bites, The Ref, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Postman, Nell, and Interview with a Vampire. I think the case can be built for the best film year of the decade, no? And probably the 80's, too?
Next, "Saving Private Ryan" and "A Clockwork Orange". I've got quite a streak going of movies I've already seen. Kind of a bummer, frankly.
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