The Shawshank Redemption As Son Of Cool Hand Luke
The Shawshank Redemption. - movie reviews
Richard Alleva
Some wise guy might dismiss The Shawshank Redemption as Son of Cool Hand Luke. So it is, but it's more than that. Frank Darabont's adaptation of a Stephen King novella seems to respond to the old Paul Newman movie, amend it, complete it.
A well-bred young banker is sent to serve a life term in Shawshank prison in Maine after being unjustly convicted of the murder of his wife and her lover. Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) seems to be a pragmatic version of Cool Hand Luke. Whereas Luke's only agenda was to run away from the chain gang, endure punishment, then run away again, Andy apparently has only limited, relatively realistic goals: he wants to survive prison with a minimum of decency, …show more content…
This isn't always the case with talented young moviemakers. When you see, say, one of Spike Lee's better jobs, you're watching a brilliant directorial talent often illuminating his script, just as often overriding it, sometimes even trying to obliterate it when the director senses that his own writing is inadequate. But in Shawshank every cut, every angle, every camera strophe is at one with the writing. I'm tempted to say that the direction simply is the writing and vice-versa, for there is never any discrepancy between what you see and the movement of the narrative. Even the occasional spectacular shot, like the helicopter's eye-view of the prison grounds near the beginning, isn't an isolated stunt but precisely the sweepingly objective look at this city of slaves that you need at the particular moment. Darabont is an artist who knows when to rein in his eloquence and when to let it loose. To see his film right after Natural Born Killers (see, Commonweal, October 7) is to realize the difference between moviemaking that tells and moviemaking that …show more content…
The entire cast is sterling, but the two leading players, Robbins and Freeman, are particularly fine. Robbins, with his slightly dented, vaguely asymmetrical face, gives Dufresne a prep school spruceness with a core of steel. Robbins helps preserve Shawshank's tension by making Dufresne a man potentially vulnerable to a despair that he is determined to resist.
As Red, Morgan Freeman has an even more difficult role: the benevolent narrator trying to understand the hero for us. Red does so much observing and explaining that we may begin to wonder if he is really a character or just a device. Only at the end is Red Redding allowed to come into his own, and it's a tribute to Freeman that his massive presence and canny delivery of lines (and even cannier pauses) imbue Red with a complexity and attractiveness that keep us hooked from his first appearance to his
Richard Alleva
Some wise guy might dismiss The Shawshank Redemption as Son of Cool Hand Luke. So it is, but it's more than that. Frank Darabont's adaptation of a Stephen King novella seems to respond to the old Paul Newman movie, amend it, complete it.
A well-bred young banker is sent to serve a life term in Shawshank prison in Maine after being unjustly convicted of the murder of his wife and her lover. Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) seems to be a pragmatic version of Cool Hand Luke. Whereas Luke's only agenda was to run away from the chain gang, endure punishment, then run away again, Andy apparently has only limited, relatively realistic goals: he wants to survive prison with a minimum of decency, …show more content…
This isn't always the case with talented young moviemakers. When you see, say, one of Spike Lee's better jobs, you're watching a brilliant directorial talent often illuminating his script, just as often overriding it, sometimes even trying to obliterate it when the director senses that his own writing is inadequate. But in Shawshank every cut, every angle, every camera strophe is at one with the writing. I'm tempted to say that the direction simply is the writing and vice-versa, for there is never any discrepancy between what you see and the movement of the narrative. Even the occasional spectacular shot, like the helicopter's eye-view of the prison grounds near the beginning, isn't an isolated stunt but precisely the sweepingly objective look at this city of slaves that you need at the particular moment. Darabont is an artist who knows when to rein in his eloquence and when to let it loose. To see his film right after Natural Born Killers (see, Commonweal, October 7) is to realize the difference between moviemaking that tells and moviemaking that …show more content…
The entire cast is sterling, but the two leading players, Robbins and Freeman, are particularly fine. Robbins, with his slightly dented, vaguely asymmetrical face, gives Dufresne a prep school spruceness with a core of steel. Robbins helps preserve Shawshank's tension by making Dufresne a man potentially vulnerable to a despair that he is determined to resist.
As Red, Morgan Freeman has an even more difficult role: the benevolent narrator trying to understand the hero for us. Red does so much observing and explaining that we may begin to wonder if he is really a character or just a device. Only at the end is Red Redding allowed to come into his own, and it's a tribute to Freeman that his massive presence and canny delivery of lines (and even cannier pauses) imbue Red with a complexity and attractiveness that keep us hooked from his first appearance to his