Assignment 26.1
The Shawshank
Redemption Analysis
"The Shawshank
Redemption" is a movie about time, patience and loyalty -- not sexy
qualities, perhaps, but they grow on you during the subterranean progress of
this story, which is about how two men serving life sentences in prison become
friends and find a way to fight off despair. The genre of “The Shawshank
Redemption” is a drama.
The story is narrated by "Red" Redding (Morgan Freeman), who has been inside the walls of Shawshank
Prison for a very long time and is its leading entrepreneur. He can get you
whatever you need: cigarettes, candy, even a little rock pick like an amateur
geologist might use. One day he and his fellow inmates watch the latest busload
of prisoners unload, and they make bets on who will cry during their first
night in prison, and who will not. Red bets on a tall, lanky guy named Andy
Dufresne (Tim Robbins), who looks like a babe in the woods.
But Andy does not cry,
and Red loses the cigarettes he wagered. Andy turns out to be a surprise to
everyone in Shawshank, because within him is such a powerful reservoir of
determination and strength that nothing seems to break him. Andy was a banker
on the outside, and he's in for murder. He's apparently innocent, and there are
all sorts of details involving his case, but after a while they take on a kind
of unreality; all that counts inside prison is its own society -- who is
strong, who is not -- and the measured passage of time.
Red is also a lifer.
From time to time, measuring the decades, he goes up in front of the parole
board, and they measure the length of his term (20 years, 30 years) and ask him
if he thinks he has been rehabilitated. Oh, most surely, yes, he replies; but
the fire goes out of his assurances as the years march past, and there is the
sense that he has been institutionalized -- that, like another old lifer who
kills himself after being paroled, he can no longer really envision life on the
outside.
Red's narration of the story allows him to speak for all of the
prisoners, who sense a fortitude and integrity in Andy that survives the years.
Andy will not kiss butt. He will not back down. But he is not violent, just
formidably sure of himself. For the warden (Bob Gunton), he is both
a challenge and a resource; Andy knows all about bookkeeping and tax
preparation, and before long he's been moved out of his prison job in the
library and assigned to the warden's office, where he sits behind an adding
machine and keeps tabs on the warden's ill-gotten gains. His fame spreads, and
eventually he's doing the taxes and pension plans for most of the officials of
the local prison system.
There are key moments in the film, as when Andy uses his clout
to get some cold beers for his friends who are working on a roofing job. Or
when he befriends the old prison librarian (James Whitmore). Or when
he oversteps his boundaries and is thrown into solitary confinement. What
quietly amazes everyone in the prison -- and us, too -- is the way he accepts
the good and the bad as all part of some larger pattern than only he can fully
see.
The partnership between the characters played by Tim Robbins and
Morgan Freeman is crucial to the way the story unfolds. This is not a
"prison drama" in any conventional sense of the word. It is not about
violence, riots or melodrama. The word "redemption" is in the title
for a reason. Stephen King bases the movie on a story, Rita Hayworth and the
Shawshank Redemption, which is quite unlike most of King's work. The horror
here is not of the supernatural kind, but of the sort that flows from the
realization than 10, 20, 30 years of a man's life have unreeled in the same
unchanging daily prison routine.
The director, Frank Darabont,
paints the prison in drab greys and shadows, so that when key events do occur,
they seem to have a life of their own.
Andy, as played
by Robbins, keeps his thoughts to himself. Red, as Freeman plays him, is
therefore a crucial element in the story: His close observation of this man,
down through the years, provides the way we monitor changes and track the
measure of his influence on those around him. And all the time there is
something else happening, hidden and secret, which is revealed only at the end.
"The
Shawshank Redemption" is not a depressing story, although I may have made
it sound that way. There is a lot of life and humour in it, and warmth in the
friendship that builds up between Andy and Red. There is even excitement and
suspense, although not when we expect it. But mostly the film is an allegory
about holding onto a sense of personal worth, despite everything. If the film
is perhaps a little slow in its middle passages, maybe that is part of the
idea, too, to give us a sense of the leaden passage of time, before the glory
of the final redemption.
Looper Analysis
Rian Johnson's
"Looper," a smart and tricky sci-fi story, sidesteps the paradoxes of
time travel by embracing them. Most time travel movies run into trouble in the
final scenes, when impossibilities pile up one upon another. This film leads to
a startling conclusion that wipes out the story's paradoxes so neatly it's as
if it never happened. You have to grin at the ingenuity of Johnson's
screenplay. “Looper”
The movie takes place
in 2044 and 2074, both of which look like plausible variations of the American
present, and then there are a few scenes set in a futuristic Shanghai. We learn
that although time travel is declared illegal once it has been discovered, a
crime syndicate cheats and uses it as a method for disposing of its enemies.
Imagine this. A man with shotgun stands by himself in a field. A second man
materializes out of thin air. The first man blasts a hole in him.
The thin-air guy, who
was bound and hooded, is a man from the future who has been sent back in time
to be assassinated. The shotgun guy is known as a "Looper." He has
been sent back into time to be the triggerman. Eventually, when he grows old
enough, he will be sent back in time to be killed by his own younger self. This
is known as "closing the loop."
Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, the triggerman in 2044. Bruce Willis plays Old
Joe, sent back from the future. The loop is not closed, however, because Old
Joe arrives without a hood, and Young Joe hesitates when he realizes his latest
target is … himself. He knew that would happen eventually (it's part of the deal),
but a hood would have prevented him from knowing which victim was himself.
This leads to the kind
of weird scene that only time travel makes possible. The two Joes go to a
nearby diner, grab a booth, and have a conversation. Imagine that you're sitting
across from yourself with a three-decade age difference. This is an opening for
an endless conversation about the emotional and metaphysical implications of
the meeting, but Johnson perhaps wisely makes their conversation more
pragmatic. Perhaps professional hit men aren't inclined toward philosophy.
The story gains depth with the introduction of romance. In most
thrillers, female characters tend toward eye candy and are extraneous to the
plot. Not here. Young Joe meets Sara (Emily Blunt), a fiercely
independent woman who lives on a Kansas farm with her son, Cid (Pierce Gagnon).
Although Young Joe has literally come from nowhere, they slowly grow close. In
the future, we learn, Old Joe was married, and his wife (Summer Qing) was
murdered by a figure known as The Rainmaker.
It's not revealing too much to tell that Old Joe has reason to
believe that young Cid may grow up to become The Rainmaker, and so Old and
Young Joe are trapped in a situation with no pleasant prospects. The film is
further enriched by the performances of Jeff Daniels as
Abe, the future boss of the crime syndicate, and by Paul Dano as Seth, a friend of Old Joe who fears
the loop is about to be closed on him.
Think this through. If
the loop is closed on you, did you never exist? Or did you live your younger
life up until the point you kill your older self? "Looper," to its
credit, doesn't avoid this question. It's up to you to decide if it answers it.
Time travel may be logically impossible, but once we allow a film to use it, we
have to be grateful if it makes sense according to its own rules.
Rian Johnson's first feature was
the well-received, low-budget indie titled “Brick" (2005), which told a
high-school story in a film noir style, narrated by Gordon-Levitt. The second
was the con-man puzzlement “The Brother Bloom" (2009). Now time travel. In
all three, he begins with generic expectations and then confounds them. The key
is in his writing. "Looper" weaves between past and present in a way
that gives Johnson and his actor’s opportunities to create a surprisingly
involving narrative.
Conclusion
