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Essay on The Shawshank Redemption
Introduction:
An intricate and surprisingly moving guide to retaining ones own humanity while those around you lose theirs, The Shawshank Redemption is an actors dream. In the late 40s Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) is a young and successful banker, content with life. Unfortunately the sky falls in when his wife and her golf pro lover are discovered riddled with bullets, barely hours after Andy learnt of her adultery.
The final, crushing blow is that Andy actually drove up to the fateful house, loaded with whisky and bullets; a fact he readily admits to. Now, however, the stories related by Andy and the prosecuting DA diverge; according to the latter Andy took cold-blooded revenge, even pausing to reload his weapon. Faced with such a preponderance of evidence, Andy staggers from the courtroom under the load of two life sentences. (Abiola Sinclair (1994))
Inside Shawshank Prison, which hearsay calls the most brutal in New England, the inmates place bets. Spotting the lanky and out of place figure of Andy, Ellis "Red" Redding (Morgan Freeman) reckons that he'll be the first to crack.
With little fanfare the reasoning behind this prediction becomes clear; the sadistic and swaggering figures of Warden Norton (Bob Gunton) and head guard Capt. Hadley (Clancy Brown). Driven by the need to prove that they run the tightest, toughest jail within hundreds of miles, arbitrary abuse is frequent. Andy seems to cotton onto this fact pretty quickly, which is why he's not the one who breaks down in a paroxysm of regret; that honour is reserved for Fat Ass (Frank Medrano). Regrettably he doesn't live to learn from his mistake; Shawshank is hard like that.
Based upon a short story by Stephen King, The Shawshank Redemption is unlike any other adaptation of his work. Mercifully free of cheap horror and overwrought dialogue....
