Screen
Alleva, Richard
ADJUSTING TO HELL 'SHAWSHANK' & 'BLUE SKIES' ome 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...
...Robbins helps preserve Shawshank's tension by making Dufresne a man potentially vulnerable to a despair that he is determined to resist...
...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...
...Let Carly act out her dream of herself as sex goddess and Hank becomes her votary...
...Much later in the movie Morgan Freeman is also paroled, also fails to adjust...
...Under the late Tony Richardson's attentive direction, this performance, like all great acting, enforces Andre Gide's warning, "Please do not understand me too quickly...
...Shawshank is hell and you really can't adjust to hell without also adjusting to despair...
...All the villains are stereotypes...
...But that's only the top, bickering layer of discord...
...Though Andy does give way to Luke-like bursts of rebellion—at one point he sends a gorgeous Mozart duet rippling over the prison PA system—and takes his lumps for them, he more often seems less a rebel than an incarnation of Pope John XXIII's dictum, "Notice everything, overlook much, improve a little...
...There's no reason why villains shouldn't be well-rounded characters, yet remain utterly villainous...
...At the center of this movie is the marriage of Carly and Hank Marshall, and here is how their two very smart and smartass daughters sum it up: "He's blind and she's crazy...
...But we're soon out of such Strindbergian depths as Carly zooms around trying to expose the government plot and spring her husband from the loony bin...
...lue Skies, on the other hand, is complex but finally runs away from its own complexity...
...But in Shawshank every cut, every angle, every camera strophe is at one with the writing...
...Though Robbins is excellent, he and his makeup artist haven't contrived to age Dufresne convincingly through twenty years of imprisonment...
...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...
...Carly is never more alluring than when she's in an early stage of an emotional bender...
...Dufresne's shrewdness gains him one concession after another: out-of-door work and free beer for his buddies, protection from a gang of rapists, the post of assistant librarian, and, finally, permission to start a prison tutorial program...
...In the final thirty minutes, Hank is pretty much out of the movie—dragooned into an asylum and drugged into torpor because he has been trying to foil a government cover-up of a nuclear disaster...
...It takes him twenty years to play it but when he does you feel as if you're watching the perfect illustration of Dylan Thomas's lines, Light breaks where no sun shines...
...He can't seem to face her problem at a basic level...
...This is passionate and complicated stuff, and the screenplay serves it up hot and rich for more than two-thirds of the way through the story...
...An old paroled convict, wonderfully played by James Whitmore, having realized that he can't adjust to life "outside," prepares to hang himself...
...The impossible is achieved and so becomes possible...
...In fact, Lange is so convincingly self-entranced that she gave me R.D...
...I kept wondering how the subplot concerning Hank's friction with army brass was going to dovetail with the main story of marital havoc...
...He can recognize her illness for what it is but can't recognize his own opportunism...
...And that it all seems probable (at least while you're watching the movie) is a tribute to screenwriter-director Darabont, most especially to screenwriter Darabont, for his directing talent is entirely rooted in his writing...
...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 last...
...Carly is a manic-depressive, with the emphasis on manic...
...But The Shawshank Redemption isn't itself complex, just terribly moving...
...Well, it didn't...
...Her emotional binges take on various forms: adulterous flings, reckless driving, raving in public, hyper-shopping, exotic dancing...
...Jones's coiled strength is mesmerizing and Lange makes Carly's flights from reality both dangerous and lyrical...
...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 bedizens...
...Would sanity diminish this woman...
...They're perfect for each other...
...In his dreary, halfway-house room, he climbs up to a beam and, instead of simply putting his head in the noose, takes out a knife...
...Laing-like doubts about how beneficial psychiatric treatment would be for Carly...
...The political intrigue hijacks the domestic drama...
...The two linked sequences, accomplished by Darabont's inextricable talents of writing and directing, certify Andy Dufresne's guiding principle, "Get busy living or get busy dying...
...It's just too bad that Richardson and his writers finally wanted to understand their own rich story too tidily, too comfortingly...
...She's a movie magazine addict who defines herself by mimicking Bardot and other current sexpots...
...Only after Whitmore hangs himself does the director reveal what he did with the knife, and this revelation deepens our sense of despair...
...Let me call attention to two linked sequences...
...That the prison has a population apparently 98 percent Caucasian is a bit of sociological cowardice...
...Hank has no strategy to deal with her madness, only improvised tactics, like tossing her into a swimming pool after she's heated up all the males at a military social...
...It has its faults...
...And all the coincidences that bring about Andy's false conviction and the subsequent revelation of the real murderer add up to a few coincidences too many...
...His movement through civilian life parallels Whitmore's and he is even lodged in the same room...
...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...
...Darabont is also a wonderful director of actors...
...That's an accurate summary but only a summary...
...That's The Shawshank Redemption...
...So he uses his knowledge of investment strategies and tax shelters to ingratiate himself with the head guard and the warden, both greedy brutes whose avarice can be played upon to neutralize their sadism...
...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...
...The dialogue is witty and concise, and the narrative goes in interesting directions...
...Dufresne plays a cooler hand to bring about his redemption than Luke ever did because he has a wild card, a very wild card indeed, up his sleeve...
...This isn't always the case with talented young moviemakers...
...Simplice ma buono," said Toscanini when he first read through Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings...
...Robbins, with his slightly dented, vaguely asymmetrical face, gives Dufresne a prep school spruceness with a core of steel...
...Freeman, too, climbs up to that beam with knife in hand and again the camera fails to take in what the ex-con is doing with it...
...The entire cast is sterling, but the two leading players, Robbins and Freeman, are particularly fine...
...Yet, finally, we learn that there's even more to Andy Dufresne than that...
...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, and he wants to share that decency with his circle of friends—the grimly stoic "Red" Redding (Morgan Freeman) and a few others...
...As long as her husband is stationed in Hawaii, she's in paradise with plenty of sun, sand, blue water, and blue sky to set off her beauty and plenty of guest NATO officers to admire it...
...His ministrations turn sexual and reconciliations end up in bed...
...He's an army scientist catching flak from his superiors for urging underground hydrogen testing when they would prefer it on the surface...
...Her antics embarrass, maybe even terrify him, but undeniably turn him on...
...Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart Push in their tides...
...But, 16 SCREEN this time, when we see this man's handiwork we are elated and despair is dispelled...
...Frank Darabont's adaptation of a Stephen King novella seems to respond to the old Paul Newman movie, amend it, complete it...
...The time is 1960...
...RICHARD ALLEVA 19...
...And that's because he doesn't really want to...
...That's a shame, because as long as the script fuels them, 18 Tommy Lee Jones and Jessica Lange give the performances of their lives...
...Simple but good...
...There simply has to be...
...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...
...By keeping Whitmore's hands out of camera range while the ex-con does something with the knife, Darabont infuses our dread with sheer curiosity...
...But when Hank's stubborness gets him transferred to the mainland, Carly has to exchange blue skies for Operation Blue Skies, a nuclear project that keeps her mate shuttling between Alabama and the West Coast while wife and daughter stagnate in the land of George Wallace...
...Freeman seems to age in his very bones...
...Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf 'has turned into The China Syndrome, and everything is tidied up in a reassuring d6nouement that is utterly untrue to the messy veracities that are the real substance of this movie...
...Think of Wes Studi's Magua in The Last of the Mohicans...
...Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) seems to be a pragmatic version of Cool Hand Luke...
...Yet this movie finally earns the tears and applause that audiences are now bestowing on it...
...But their daughters clasp each other in misery as Hank and Carly verbally lacerate each other at top volume in the next room...
...Until it takes a fatal wrong turn...
...There is a blood-freezing moment when Carly looks at her vegetableized husband and—smiles...
...He is the dependent one now and she can be the nurturer...
Vol. 121 • November 1994 • No. 19
