Review: The Shawshank Redemption (dir. Frank Darabont, 1994)
Prison films are a tricky genre. The prisons themselves become
metaphors for the shackles of authority, society, or
psychological inhibitions that prevent people from being
completely free human beings. We empathize with the prisoners,
and never the warden (unless, as in Brubaker, he fights for the
prisoners’ rights), because they are supposed to represent that
nebulous quality known as “the human spirit”.  The tricky part
is that prisoners are usually in jail for a reason. An entire
sub-genre of P.O.W. films avoids this problem by making prison
not a matter of crime, but of being in the wrong army; with
Nazis for wardens, who wouldn’t be on the prisoners’ side? But
in The Shawshank Redemption, the prisoners are, with few
exceptions, convicted murderers with life sentences. Except,
maybe, Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins). A banker convicted of
killing his wife and her lover, Dufresne is shy and withdrawn
when he first arrives in the prison. It’s not rea