The two most important days in a person’s life are the day he is born and the day he finds out why. And also the day he watches "The Shawshank Redemption."
The beauty of this movie is that it can’t be classified under any one genre. It’s formed a genre by itself. It sits on an exclusive shelf, a shelf that has now become the benchmark for greatness.
There are so many sub-plots and stories within the film that any one of them could have been made into a film by itself, and a good one at that.
"The Shawshank Redemption" is a love story. I know it’s absurd to call a movie a love story if it doesn’t feature a single female character and has no notable gay encounters, but that’s what makes this film so great. It taps into an emotion, an idea that has for many years been ignored by the masses; the strongest love exists in a friendship.
We live today in a world where love is thought to be exclusive only to lovers. Shawshank brought this idea crashing down to its knees. There are many scenes in this movie that do move you, but there is one scene in particular that really reached out to me. Now, if you are one of those people who has lived your life under a rock and not seen this movie, don’t worry I won’t be going into too much detail or handing out any spoilers. It’s the scene where Andy buys his co-prisoners the privilege of a cold beer off the guards. It was this gesture that helped blossom his friendship with them and it is this friendship from which the movie derives its purpose. When one of his co-prisoners goes up to Andy, offering him a beer bottle, he declines, saying that he doesn’t drink. I kid you not, I paused the movie right after this scene, just to take it all in. It is perhaps few of the greatest minutes of cinematic action, or rather non-action I have seen, and I needed a few moments to take it all in. One of Andy’s friends, Red (the narrator) is played by a certain Morgan Freeman, and his deep baritone narration only further elevates this scene.
I haven’t watched the movie in over a year now, but every scene is till fresh in my memory, and I still get the same goose bumps thinking about them. What amazed me about the film is that the writers were able to romanticize the prison. I feel a bit of this lies in its name; Shawshank is just too beautiful a name to be wasted on a prison. There's something about this place that makes you want to go there, and few movies make you feel wistful about prisons.
Quite simply, it is the greatest movie I have ever seen and is the greatest I ever will see. It’s always there for you, waiting for you, waiting to be re-discovered, waiting to be re-watched and waiting for you to fall in love with it all over again.
