Irredeemable
This is about an unlikely prison inmate, but not in the way you assume.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: Every journalistic article produced by human hands this week will concern a court proceeding in Manhattan. But not in this space. Because, what would be the point?]
Over the past 42 weeks, paid Bully Pulpit subscribers have been rewarded (so far) with the first 60% of my serialized satirical novel, Pluto Walks the Earth. I’ll spend no time promoting it here, except to say that the main character, an enthusiastic but obtuse seeker of New Age spiritualism, has a favorite movie.
That movie is The Shawshank Redemption.
Pluto is not alone. The film sits atop of the IMDb list of the 250 greatest movies ever made, above The Godfather and The Godfather Part 2, above Casablanca, above Seven Samurai, above Schindler's List, above Sunset Boulevard, above Fargo, above Paths of Glory, above Citizen Kane, above 12 Angry Men, above Lawrence of Arabia, above North by Northwest, above To Kill a Mockingbird, above Singin’ in the Rain, above Bicycle Thieves, above The Lives of Others, above Yojimbo, above Chinatown, above Gone With the Wind, above Fargo, above On the Waterfront, above The Deer Hunter, above Jaws, above Rocky, above Groundhog Day, above It’s a Wonderful Life, above The Grapes of Wrath, above The Battle of Algiers, above The 400 Blows, above The Sound of Music.
And 191 places above The Third Man, which was and is a cinema masterpiece.
But I’m not going to waste your time arguing that The Shawshank Redemption should be lower on the list — let’s say, between John Wick and The Sixth Sense. No, I’m arguing that none of the three should be anywhere near a best-movie list that doesn’t go from 1 to 10,000, least of all Shawshank, which is absolutely terrible in every dimension. Offensively terrible, actually.
For the uninitiated (if there exists such a person), TSR is about the young banker Andy (Tim Robbins), who in 1947 is wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife and her lover. He is, therefore, the protagonist — who goes to prison, where a number of things happen:
He is at the mercy of a corrupt and sadistic Warden Norton (Bob Gunten) — because of course the warden is evil, just like evil politicians, evil businessmen, evil CIA officials, evil military officers and other cinematic cartoons written by people who wouldn’t know genuine human conflict from an episode of Popeye.
He is brutally gang raped by predatory hard-timers, creating a level of innocent suffering that even the original miscarriage of justice didn’t confer. All of which, it seems, he silently endures — because his level of courage and righteousness is off the charts.
He befriends fellow prisoner “Red” Redding (Morgan Freeman), who is Black, wise, preternaturally patient and loyal — altogether the Magical Negro figure Freeman reprised with Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven. It did not seem to occur to screenwriter/director Frank Darabont that Freeman’s character is idealized to the point of condescension and beyond, like all the Native Americans in Dances with Wolves (which is the treacly Shawshank of westerns and cringeworthy in all the same ways).
Robbins preens for a solid 2 hours and 22 minutes, the picture of stoic superiority. This required no acting. It’s his public persona, too. (He was fantastic in Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham and good in Robert Altman’s The Player, but everything else he’s ever done — especially his vanity polemic Bob Roberts — has been unwatchable. Why the sainted Dufresne has even earned his surpassing arrogance is unclear, since he was a drunken, cuckolded, pistol-wielding banker when he met his sorry fate.
On the strength of his keen intellect, though, he outwits all of his antagonists, escapes from a tunnel he’s been painstakingly digging without detection for 19 years, embezzles the bad guys’ dirty money and finds tropical refuge in Mexico — where his paroled friend Red eventually joins him. Cue “Ebony and Ivory.” Revenge is theirs, which is not the same thing as redemption.
In short, a supposed human drama where absolutely nothing rings true, where cutout villains get their just desserts in a way that resembles nothing in real life and where a smug and thoroughly unlikeable hero enjoys an ever escalating series of triumphs, not one of which in the context of a state prison would have been possible.
It is a shallow, feelgood flick that can’t decide whether the main character is an underdog, overdog or both, and boasts all the character richness of Debbie Does Dallas. They could have casted the movie with Colorforms.
Want to see a better movie than IMDb’s No. 1? Go to Netflix, close your eyes, scroll and randomly click. You can’t do worse. Even if you happen upon, I dunno, Weekend at Bernie’s, at least you won’t have your intelligence insulted. Or your humanity.
And the title character isn’t nearly as stiff.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: For hate mail, click below.]
You had me worried there for the first couple of paragraphs, Bob ... but yeah. I must confess to have never seen the entirety of SR -- all I've seen are clips or a scene or two while channel surfing -- but none of that was intriguing enough for me seek out the entire movie ... and that's okay. If I shuffle off Shakespeare's mortal coil without having seen SR, the world will go on spinning through space as the human race grinds its way to extinction. No harm, no foul.
But I'm with you on "The Third Man," no doubt. It's great.
All the best!
Yipes! I'm not much of a moviegoer so I haven't seen Shawshank. But then the shallow treacliness that you relate isn't that different from the shallow treacliness of a zillion other films. And that sort of explains why I'm not much of a moviegoer. The Apostle is the last film I saw, sat all the way through, and would recommend to others, and that has to be 25 years old. So thanks for sparing me this mess.