The surprise selection of Mike Flanagan’s “The Life of Chuck” as the winner of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival People’s Choice Award suggests that there is still a voracious public appetite for what might be termed the sweeter side of Stephen King, a master of gory horror who’s nevertheless not above sugar-dusting certain narratives to make them that much more palatable for a mass audience.
The film’s triumph — and the question of whether it will thrust an independently produced movie into the 2024 Oscar race — coincides almost exactly with the 30th anniversary of what may be the most widely beloved cinematic adaptation of any King story: 1994’s “The Shawshank Redemption,” which eschewed supernatural elements and ended up in the rarefied air reserved for canonical classics.
As of this writing, “The Shawshank Redemption” is No. 1 on the Internet Movie Database’s user-generated list of the Top 250 Movies of All Time, boasting an average rating of 9.3/10, derived from nearly 3 million total votes.
Over at Letterboxd — a hipper, more cinephile-friendly site — Frank Darabont’s film ranks No. 8, bracketed on either side by art-house classics from Japan and South Korea. In 2007, the gatekeepers at the American Film Institute placed “Shawshank” at No. 72 in a roll call dominated by the likes of Steven Spielberg, Frank Capra and Alfred Hitchcock.
Such widespread acclaim marks the culmination of a long, strange trip upward from box-office ignominy — a comeback story of historic proportions.
In retrospect, 1994 marked a paradigm shift in the landscape of American cinema — a pitched battle between duelling exercises in nostalgia, both boasting classic soundtracks. In one corner, the two-fisted, below-the-belt tactics of Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” which battered viewers and critics into submission; in the other, the warm hug of “Forrest Gump,” which reassured Boomers in the audience that life was like a box of chocolates, and also that they were on the right side of history.
“Forrest Gump” may have won the battle, but “Pulp Fiction” won the war. As for “Shawshank” — which played both sides against the middle(brow) and reached even further back for inspiration than its rivals, to the melodramas of the 1940s — it looked like a loser, going zero for seven at the Academy Awards. More worryingly for its studio, Columbia Pictures, it flopped in wide release despite good reviews, in part because its title apparently seemed forbidding and obscure (too many syllables, perhaps).
But the film proved a word-of-mouth hit on home video and cable, to the point of becoming ubiquitous. In 2014, a Wall Street Journal story suggested that its ancillary revenues alone exceeded $80 million.
Beyond the film’s startling reversal of commercial fortune, it’s worth wondering what it is about “Shawshank” that resonates. At its core, it’s a story about the complex relationship between guilt and innocence, embodied respectively by two inmates who bond over a span of several decades in the middle of the 20th century.
Red (Morgan Freeman) is a wise, wizened lifer who’s lived to regret and renounce the brutal act of violence that landed him in Shawshank State Penitentiary. Andy (Tim Robbins) is a well-educated, charismatic banker who claims to have been railroaded at his murder trial. Besides marking time — which, as Red explains in a sonorous voice-over, passes slowly behind bars — the pair’s friendship symbolizes a form of interracial solidarity as old as Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in “The Defiant Ones,” while also evoking the anti-authority ethos of prison-yard masterpieces like “Cool Hand Luke.”
As a piece of filmmaking, “The Shawshank Redemption” mines a rich vein of red-blooded Hollywood classicism, hovering between lyricism and brutality. The cinematography, by the great Roger Deakins, is terrifically handsome and expressive. At the same time, the film is shamelessly manipulative and sentimental, qualities that for many viewers — including, probably, the legions of acolytes that keep shoving the film toward the top of the historical heap — are strengths rather than liabilities.
It’s telling, perhaps, of the masculine thrust of so much movie-buffdom that a narrative without a single significant female character — notwithstanding the glossy, pin-up presences of Rita Hayworth and Raquel Welch on Andy’s cellblock wall — has gotten so much traction in living rooms and online spaces alike, and the scenes depicting Andy’s clash with a gang of rapists (and that group’s slapstick comeuppance) have aged badly.
What still works — occasionally like gangbusters — is the dynamic between Freeman and Robbins, both of whom are excellent. The latter was not the studio’s first choice, and it’s fun to imagine a version of the film starring Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks or Kevin Costner as Andy. (The movie may have made more money the first time around with any of them in the role.)
Credit is also due to Darabont’s screenplay adaptation for homing in so smartly on the potently cinematic elements of King’s relatively obscure 1982 novella (which had the even more unwieldy title of “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption”).
Though the film runs nearly two and a half hours, it’s a carefully paced and absorbing sort of epic, one that works you over slowly and lands a series of emotional haymakers in the final round: the climactic scene, which was reshot at the behest of the producers, builds to a literally oceanic moment of catharsis.
In a way, it’s ironic that a crowd-pleaser as shrewdly engineered as “The Shawshank Redemption” took so long to locate a crowd, but — like Red and Andy — the movie and its fans eventually found each other and will likely never part again.
