Word: darabont
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Dates: during 1994-1994
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Jailbirds and moviegoers both do time -- and depending on the picture, two hours can seem like a life sentence. Time is the preoccupation of Frank Darabont's deeply satisfying prison drama about a man wrongly convicted of murder who plots revenge and escape. Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman are tough, smart, patient. So is the film...
...Shawshank Redemption is based on a Stephen King novella that is just a little too smooth for its own good. It's satisfying to watch all the book's moving parts mesh, but a certain lifelike uncertainty is sacrificed to the neatness. Happily, writer-director Frank Darabont understands this. He makes you feel the maddening pace of prison time without letting his picture succumb to it. He is also efficient and clever with secondary characters like James Whitmore's con librarian, who's been in so long he can't survive on the outside...
There may be something redemptive in this story -- a triumph of the tormented human spirit and all that -- but neither Darabont nor the actors overplay the point. They are content to update the old prison genre deftly and unpretentiously. It always did work when it was done well, and it still does; and if using Redemption in the title instead of the more accurate Revenge helps to bring in the upwardly mobile, who cares? James Cagney would have felt right at home in Shawshank...