Note: This article contains spoilers.
“I
have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about,” says Red (Morgan Freeman) as a Mozart aria soothes
the hard-bitten Shawshank State Prison world with sopranic caress. “I like to think they were singing about
something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart
ache because of it.”
Many of our hearts
have ached when we’ve seen The Shawshank Redemption, which was released in the U.S. twenty years ago today. We sympathize with its sense of despair,
resonating with the intensity of the injustice dealt to Andy Dufresne, the
perfect storm of circumstance and betrayal that lands him at Shawshank, or the years
of long-suffering it finally takes him to break free.
Or we might identify
with the film’s powerful images of hope amid that same darkness. Maybe it’s Andy playing music over the P.A.
system, or maybe it’s him emerging from solitary confinement two weeks later,
smiling (“I had Mr. Mozart to keep me company . . . . That’s the beauty of
music: they can’t get that from you”).
Maybe it’s Red daring to play a few quiet notes on the harmonica that
Andy gives him, a flicker of music, smaller but no less real, in the dark night
of the cell block and the soul. Or maybe
it’s the film’s climactic moment of release—Andy, spilling from the sewer pipe,
standing tall in the rain, hands spread aloft in freedom.
Somewhere, deep
in our culture’s collective spirit, The Shawshank Redemption touches a
wound that needs the power of its comfort. We need to walk through the hell of Andy’s
imprisonment for an hour and 59 minutes and 36 seconds—a cinematic
eternity—before we get to see him splash into liberation, because that’s
what living in a fallen, unjust, broken world is like sometimes: long seasons
of “How long, O Lord?”, seasons of rights trampled, of families broken, of personhood
betrayed by impersonal systems. Andy spends
two decades in prison; God the Son spends two nights in death.
But it doesn't stop
there, because the lamentation does end, the stone does roll away, Andy does
pour forth from 500 yards of pipe—and we know it’s all right, there’s a joyful ending
coming, it wasn't all for naught, and he’s going to be okay. As the viewers, we are with him: through the
trial and false conviction, through the first years of adjustment and abuse at
Shawshank, through the grueling passage of time that, as Red says, “can draw
out like a blade,” through the murder of his adopted son and protégé. We have to know he’ll be all right, we have to
know that we’ll be all right: that the broken world of Shawshank is not
all that there is. We and our whole
world will be, must be, shall be, redeemed: we will, like Andy,
tumble from the pipe into the wall-less, oppression-less freedom of the cosmos as
God created it to be.
As it happens,
the film itself bears witness to the same message of delayed hope that it
sought to tell. “It got good reviews”
when it opened, writes Roger Ebert in The Great Movies, “but did poor
business. Its $18-million original gross
didn’t cover costs; it took in only another $10 million after winning seven
Oscar nominations.” Shawshank didn’t win a single one.
Instead, the film
caught on after its run had finished. “In
one of the most remarkable stories in the history of home video,” writes Ebert,
“it found its real mass audience on tapes and discs and through TV screenings.” By 1999, he says, the film was topping the
IMDb top-250 of users’ favorites.
Fifteen years later, it’s still at number one.
That’s not bad
for a movie whose name itself was hard for its audience to remember. In interviews, actors would joke about fans
complimenting them on “Shinkshank Reduction”, for example, or “Scrimshaw Rejection”. But then, the very anonymity of the film, and
its attendant success over the years, runs parallel to Red’s initial perception
of the protagonist: it “looked like a stiff breeze would blow him over.”
We’ll recognize
the same phenomenon from our life as Christians. Jesus the Messiah “had no form or majesty that we should look at him, / nothing
in his appearance that we should desire him” (Isa. 53:2). Andy, the man who enters the prison
identified as “that tall drink of water,” the movie that fails to win any of
the Academy Awards for which it’s nominated: the savior who is crucified by the
Romans. All this must come to pass—“and then
the end will come” (Matt. 24:14). An
hour and fifty-nine cinematic minutes of life must come, yes, but there will
be redemption: injustice will be reconciled, sin will be done away with, “mourning
and crying and pain will be no more, / for the first things have passed away” (Rev.21:4). Jesus himself will be victorious. Our hope, as Edward Mote wrote in 1834, “is
built on nothing less.”
“I tell you,
those voices soared,” says Red, as Andy plays Mozart into the yard. “It was
like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls
dissolve away. And for the briefest of
moments, every last man at Shawshank felt free.” In a cinematic landscape often as forlorn as
the culture in which it resides, here’s thanks to God that Shawshank has
stood these twenty years as the pillar it deserves to be, and for the beacon of
profound, victorious hope that our Lord is and toward whom, deliberately
or not, the film hints our attention.
Sources as named, and:
“Hope Springs
Eternal: A Look Back at The Shawshank Redemption,” directed by
Constantine Nasr (Castle Rock Films / Warner Bros., 2004); featurette on The
Shawshank Redemption, 10th anniv. special ed. (2 DVDs), directed
by Frank Darabont, disc 2.
“Shawshank: The
Redeeming Feature,” written by Mark Kermode, directed by Andrew Abbott (Channel
4 Television Corporation, 2001), featurette on The Shawshank Redemption,
10th anniv. special ed. (2 DVDs), directed by Frank Darabont, disc
2.
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