Stephen King's Redemption
by Ron Reed | posted 1/01/2004
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If Stephen King writes your nightmares, then this is the one where they send you to jail for a crime you didn't commit. But, as in so many of his stories, King wants to do much more than scare us out of our theatre seats—and for proof, look no further than The Shawshank Redemption, now briefly showing in theaters on the 10th anniversary of its original release. (A special edition DVD will hit stores on October 5.)
Shawshank charms, intrigues and inspires us, and maybe that's why it stands at No. 2 in the Internet Movie Database Top 250, an ongoing poll of IMDb users. A remarkably faithful Frank Darabont adaptation of King's novella Rita Hayworth and The Shawshank Redemption, the movie lost money at the box office in 1994 but went on to bag seven Oscar nominations. And by the time it was in the hands of video vendors, those golden statues that it didn't quite get and the platinum word of mouth that it did get turned it into a genuine phenomenon.
Tim Robbins plays the role of Andy
I admit I wasn't wowed by it at first, but now I count myself among its fans. I love the film's easy pace and the welcoming, let-me-tell-you-a-story voice of its narrator—a star-making performance by Morgan Freeman who, after a couple decades in mostly smaller roles in mostly minor films, hit big with stand-out stuff in Unforgiven, Shawshank and Se7en. I love the agonizing tension between how bad the place is and how good the things that happen there can be. It's dark as hell inside Shawshank prison, but I love watching soft-spoken banker Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) kick at it—quietly, relentlessly, for decades—until it bleeds daylight. Robbins shares his co-star's ease and calm within the role, and director Darabont deserves huge credit for getting performances from every one of his actors that are far removed from the melodrama and hysteria we might expect in a Stephen King potboiler.
Of course, if that's all we expect from King, we're not paying close enough attention. The central character in The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (1999) is an 11-year-old girl lost in the Maine woods, whose hope comes from imagining herself as her hero, the gritty Red Sox relief pitcher who points to heaven after every save. A glimpse of God? Indeed. In a letter accompanying review copies, King wrote, "I have been writing about God—the possibility of God and the consequences for humans if God does exist—for 20 years now, ever since The Stand," 21 years earlier.
Morgan Freeman plays the role of Red
King grew up poor, his mom working endless crummy jobs to keep her two fatherless boys in food and clothing. He won a Bible for memorizing verses at Methodist Youth Fellowship, watched a lot of movies and spiked countless rejection slips onto a nail he pounded into his bedroom wall, proud testimony to his persistence as he submitted story after story to an endless series of pulp magazines.
He always had an eye for the horrors and cruelties to be found in life—the maggots that bred in restaurant linens he cleaned at an industrial laundry, or the soul-crushing oppression of an impoverished classmate who'd gotten some pretty new clothes and tried to rise above her circumstances. Of that latter event, King wrote (in On Writing): "Someone made a break for the fence and had to be knocked down, that was all. Once the escape was foiled and the entire company of prisoners was once more accounted for, life could go back to normal." That high school episode fueled the writer's first best-seller and hit movie Carrie, the story of a girl whose torment leads to horrific, if unintentional, retribution for her tormentors—a less than divine judgment that's not proportionate or just, but which has the horrible finality of one of Jesus' more stark and startling parables: "Fool! Tonight your soul is required of you."
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