NUMBER TEN: THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION
Putting this list together lead me to realize - as I'm sure it did all of you who finished your lists eight years ago - that the films that made the repeated cuts were ones that moved through my life with a lot of baggage attached. They were all excellent in their own way but something in them seemed to capture a time, a place or even some larger ideas I had about the world at the time. THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION occupies a very specific time, reminds me of a distinct place and repeatedly seems to speak to something personal at once.
I think Andy's hopeful and relentless march towards escape is so satisfying because we've all had our eyes on the arms of a clock at one time or another and silently begged for them to move faster. Maybe it's a shit job. You might even have a boss with a touch of the Warden in him. And I think we've all imagined our destination - the place we'd like to land - after proverbially or literally crawling through shit.
SHAWSHANK also resonates because of the stories my dad used to tell about surviving a concentration camp. He used to say that thinking about trying to make it for months or weeks or even days was too much so he'd focus on living another hour or another morning. Andy's painful and incremental path to escape reminds me of those stories and the hope it takes for anyone in that kind of situation to come out alive on the other end.
One of the real gifts in my biz is the opportunity to have conversations with some incredible people. When I had the chance to speak with Morgan Freeman he was there to talk about one of his many other projects but there was no way I was leaving the room without getting some Shawshank dish. I asked him if while he was working on the movie he had any idea what it would become. The answer was really a lesson about instincts, I think. He told me loved the script but he really just had no idea the movie was going to be that good but that he sensed instantly that Frank Darabont was brilliant and he went with it.
This movie stands on hallowed ground for those of us to who watched it close the run of late shows at The Plaza movie theatre in Westwood just before the digits rolled over to 2000. And now that some time has passed I simply have to put it down to some kind of divine intervention by the Cinema Gods that while we were all mourning the loss of our beloved late shows we were being shown a film about the power of hope for the future.
