I saw a movie this week that most people my age have already seen—about two decades ago or more. But for me, it was a totally new experience: The Shawshank Redemption. Several of my friends have cited as being contention among their favorite movies of all-time, and I’ve even had a still-sealed limited edition Steelbook of the movie sitting on my shelf for many months.
Honestly, I avoided this movie for many years based off of the drab, monochromatic iconography I had seen for it and the false assumption that this was another gritty war movie (which I always do my best to avoid). Had I know the film would have the amount of character depth and philosophical content that it does, I would have watched it much earlier. But that’s my loss.
Even so, the fact that I am experiencing this film right now for the first time gives me the unique opportunity to share my raw thoughts, review and character analysis as part of this blog. And so, let’s take a look at this movie in the form of an analytical character study of the five characters who stood out to me the most in the film (for better or worse)…
Tommy
Of all the characters in this film, it is young Tommy that I hated the most, beginning almost immediately after he was introduced. From virtually the second he first appears on-screen, this movie blatantly wants us to LOVE poor, doomed Tommy—so much so that the transparent nature of Tommy’s character development is insulting to the viewers:
“Oh no, this young kid just can’t seem to get it right and keeps messing up and landing back in jail!”
“Awwwww, he wants to earn his high school diploma so that he can make a life with his never-seen-but-mentioned-once young wife and daughter! The world is against him and he never learned to read—but do-gooder Andy is here to save the day!”
“Sniff! Poor Tommy threw a tantrum because he believes he is a complete idiot that can’t even pass his GED test! But he just needs to have more faith in himself—it turns out he passed after all!”
And of course—OF COURSE—Tommy is the character who fate (okay, the script) has decreed happens to have the direct knowledge to free Andy from his wrongful lifetime imprisonment. And as a result, Tommy fulfills what was so badly telegraphed by every moment of his screen time—serving as a sacrifice to make the audience feel sad when he is brutally gunned down, murdered by the corruption of Shawshank.
I have heard that this character is played differently in the novel (which I haven’t read) that this film is based upon, and I’m glad to hear that. Because in the film itself, I cannot stand this character or the derivative way that he’s written to pull at the viewer’s heartstrings.
Brooks
While he is a relatively minor character with only a handful of minutes of screen time in the movie, the elderly inmate Brooks Hatlen is among my favorite and the best-written characters in the movie.
Kindly Brooks served his sentence in Shawshank so long that he became institutionalized and unable to cope with the reality of being paroled and living in the outside world. While he tries to adapt to life as a free man by getting a job and a place to live, he feels afraid and out-of-place in the unstructured world he finds himself in.
Brooks decides to—and does—kill himself via hanging. It’s a sad end to the sweet, grandfather-like character—but also a laudable one. Brooks decided on what he wanted from life (and death) and followed through, regardless of what anyone else would think of his decision—a decision that is a largely controversial and debated one in our society. To me, that’s one of the most admirable things a man can do, and worthy of respect.
Warden Norton
Warden Samuel Norton has to be among the best antagonists I’ve seen in a movie, because he is just so DISAPPOINTING. When we’re introduced to this character at the prison, his devotion to an intensely stringent Lawful Good style of running the institution immediately appealed to me. Here was a man who knew how to use rules and the law and protocol to brutally exact change in his inmates!
But as the film went on, I learned that the warden himself was corrupt, choosing money and power over justice and truth. Warden Norton even goes so far as to incite murder in order to keep the innocent main character incarcerated and under his control.
Ultimately, he shows his hypocritical nature and true colors by committing suicide rather than facing justice when the truth about him comes out. This hasty action to evade paying for his crimes feels wholly different to me than the deliberate choice made by Brooks, who owed nothing to anyone and carefully determined that there was nothing he wanted to live for in this world anymore. While Brooks’ decision was respect-worthy to me, Warden Norton’s feels like pure cowardice to escape from paying his debt to society and honoring the system of rules and laws he was supposed to stand for.
What a colossal disappointment of a man—and what a wonderfully easy-to-hate, truly villainous antagonist.
Red
And having discussed the two men who committed suicide for two very different reasons brings us to Morgan Freeman’s character of “Red” (Ellis Boyd Redding). Like Brooks, Red has spent the majority of his life in prison and is doubtful that he could survive in the world outside of jail.
Red jokes he is “the only guilty man” in Shawshank, but the first two times we see him appear before the parole board he gives a bottled response about being rehabilitated and shows no true signs of remorse.
After Andy’s escape, Red gives a truthful response to the parole board, citing his genuine remorse for his crimes as a youth and admitting he doesn’t know what “rehabilitated” actually means and doesn’t care. This earns Red his parole, where he lives in the same home as Brooks did and works at the same job as Brooks did.
But whereas Brooks chose to die, Andy gave Red something to live for—a promise to fulfill. Red ultimately chooses life and to go on living as a result of this promise, rekindling hope in his heart for himself and his place in the world.
Andy
I don’t have much to say about Andy himself, but I do love that he functions as a sort of savior in the movie. (Technically Andy is a “white savior” since he is white, but I don’t think that’s relevant to the story being told here.)
Seeing the brutality and corruption and despair that goes on in Shawshank, Andy spends his decades in the prison enacting to make life better for all of the inmates while working toward his own escape. He creates an unthinkably unlikely library for the inmates to enrich themselves with intellectually, tutors Tommy to achieve necessary educational goals and even acquires the evidence necessary to end Warden Norton’s evil reign over the prison.
Perhaps most importantly on an emotional level, after experiencing the death of Brooks and prophesizing a similar end for Red, Andy implements a (successful) plan to prevent the same fate from befalling Red.
While Andy is a bit flat himself personality-wise, I can relate to his ideals and praise him for efforts to act as a sort of “hero that saves everyone” to the rest of the cast. These actions are not always successful, but it is the effort itself that make Andy a true hero—even if his name is never cleared and he is wrongly recorded by the law as a double-murderer forevermore.
So who or what is redeemed in the The Shawshank Redemption?
There’s a wide variety of answers to this question depending upon the angle or framework that you’re looking at the movie from. But from my own specific perspective, this is an easy thing to answer. Andy himself is blameless–he committed no crime and is sin-free, so he needs no redemption himself. But through his own determination and sacrifices as a sort of savior, Andy created the opportunity for the institution and its inmates to achieve redemption.
Overall
I found this to be a beautiful movie… of the prison/fantasy genre. The lovable portrayal of the inmates with hearts of gold (besides a few psychotic rapists here and there) is hard to accept as realistic, as are some other facets of the actual overarching plot. I particularly hated the insufferable depiction of Tommy and the convenience his story added to the plot.
But even so, I found myself invested in the characters and having feelings and thoughts about them long after I finished the film. There are some wonderful quotes, themes and lessons to be learned from this movie, and I genuinely love that it is able to portray both “getting busy living” and “getting busy dying” in a balanced and positive light.
I don’t know that this is necessarily the greatest movie of all-time as many rankings and lists would have it be believed, but it is certainly a content-rich movie worthy of viewing and reflection.
