Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying

People who know me, know me as a man of many adjectives. I love using adjectives to describe anything i like. But a certain movie which goes by the name " The Shawshank Redemption" has left me speechless. Any adjective i can think of to describe this movie would be a gross understatement. Whenever i watch this movie again i start to admire it more than the last time. I saw this movie again this time around when i went home, the other movie which i think match TSR is “FOREST GUMP” another gem of a movie immortalised by TOM HANKS I’ll write about it some other time, for now TSR. 

                     Perhaps this is the only way i can salute the movie.

TSR is based on a novel by Stephen King titled "Rita Hayworth and shawshank redemption" . The plot uses the very familiar "innocent man in prison" theme albeit with a lot of difference. Andy Dufresne( brilliantly played by Tim robbins) is a quiet banker who is wrongly convicted of the double murder of his wife and a pro golfer whom she was seeing behind his back. He is ordered to serve two consecutive life sentences in Maine's Shawshank prison beginning in 1947.Andy first learns of the dark side of Shawshank when another inmate is beaten to death by Captain Byron Hadley(Clancy Brown) who is a pawn in the hands of the twisted warden Samuel Norton(Bob Gunton).

The story is narrated by Ellis boyd "red" redding(Morgan Freeman) popular in the prison as "red", the self proclaimed entrepreneur or as he put it " the Sears and Roebuck" of shawshank prison, the man who could get you anything and everything .The first contact Andy makes with an inmate is Red, to whom he makes the unusual demand of a rock hammer.This was the beginning of a fine friendship between Red and Andy which we see grow from strength to strength throughout the film. When the rock hammer arrives Red realises that its so small that digging a tunnel might take many many years using it. Andy uses the rock hammer for a hobby of his "rock carving", so Red quickly forgot about the tunnel angle. Andy here shows steel like character as he quickly accepts the hardships that one undergoes in a prison. The dark aspects of prison life are shown when we see Andy thrown inside bowels of the prison. Periodically Andy had to bear solitary confinement due to the evil nature of the warden.

Andy gets a new job in the prison as in charge of the library because of the outgoing lifer Brooks Hatlen who has served 50 years in Shawshank. An emotional , gut wrenching moment of the film is when the inmates read a letter sent from the outside from Brooks who is on the verge of committing suicide because he couldn’t live without this place. Red calls it " institutionalisation". Andy gets on the work of building a memorial library for Brooks in the prison. After continuously pestering the officials for funds, Andy gets his way and his first major contribution to Shawshank in the form of this library begins. Andy's intelligence and know-how is quickly utilized by everyone including the warden Norton who capitalizes on Andy's skills and devises a program to put prison inmates to work for local construction projects, exploiting the prisoners' free labor for his own personal profit, with Andy acting behind the scenes as a money launderer.


Time passes by, Red's parole is always rejected and a new inmate Tommy(Gil Bellows) makes an appearance. Some information about the real killer of Andy's wife and her lover was passed on to him from Tommy. Andy pleads with Norton to look into the matter further and to help him get a new trial but the warden dismisses him, and sentences him to a month in solitary. Tommy is shot to death to prevent him from talking any further, and the situation for Andy looks very grim when he refuses to help Norton launder money. He spends another thirty days in the bowels of the prison, and we are left wondering if he will ever get out of Shawshank.



After this Andy reveals his plan of escaping to Red . Red learns of Andy's dream of starting a new life in Zihuatanejo a small island on the coast of the Pacific. Red thinks that this is a lavish dream knowing truly well that Shawshank's security system would be hard to breach. One morning they find out that Andy is missing in his cell. On probing further they find a tunnel in the wall. Then ,it hits Red. Andy did use the rock hammer for digging a tunnel. It took him 19 long years to make it but the reward was in front him. Andy had gone through the tunnel and escaped out through the drainage system( I was ready to puke here). Red rightly put it as " Crawled through half a mile of shit smelling foul". Andy escapes , withdraws all the money from the fake account the warden's money is hidden in, tells the truth about the warden to a local newspaper ultimately leading to the suicide of Samuel Norton. We see Andy driving away in a hot pair of wheels along the coast of Pacific ocean , where else but Zihuatanejo.


Red is finally given parole after he sends out what was to be one of the dialogues of the movie to the reviewer about rehabilitation in the prison. After the initial struggle in the outside world, Red decides to join his friend Andy . The last scene is a certain goosebump moment when Andy and Red embrace each other.



As a viewer I dont know how this movie failed to win an Oscar. I understand the tough competition from Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction but clearly this movie is a notch above in more aspects than one. Firstly i have to commend the dialogue writer. Fantastic. top class. period.
The acting was some of the best I'll ever see .Both Freeman and Robbins suited the role to a 'T'. The message and the theme of storyline is like no other and how it brings out the tagline is exemplary.

"Fear can hold you prisoner, hope can set you free"

True, very true. It was hope that unlocked the gates of freedom for Andy and Red.