The Shawshank Redemption.

Some wise guy might dismiss The Shawshank Redemption as Son of Cool Hand Luke. So it is, but it's more than that. Frank Darabont's adaptation of a Stephen King novella seems to respond to the old Paul Newman movie, amend it, complete it.

A well-bred young banker is sent to serve a life term in Shawshank prison in Maine after being unjustly convicted of the murder of his wife and her lover. Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) seems to be a pragmatic version of Cool Hand Luke. Whereas Luke's only agenda was to run away from the chain gang, endure punishment, then run away again, Andy apparently has only limited, relatively realistic goals: he wants to survive prison with a minimum of decency, and he wants to share that decency with his circle of friends--the grimly stocis "Red" Redding (Morgan Freeman) and a few others. So he uses his knowledge of investment strategies and tax shelters to ingratiate himself with the head guard and the warden, both greedy brutes whose avarice can be played upon to neutralize their sadism. Dufresne's shrewdness gains him one concession after another: out-of-door work and free beer for his buddies, protection from a gang of rapists, the post of assistant librarian, and, finally, permission to start a prison tutorial program. Though Andy does give way to Luke-like bursts of rebellion--at one point he sends a gorgeous Mozart duet rippling over the prison PA system--and takes his lumps for them, he more often seems less a rebel than an incarnation of Pope John XXIII's dicturm, "Notice everything, overlook much, improve a little."

Yet, finally, we learn that there's even more to Andy Dufresne than that. There simply has to be. Shawshank is hell and you really can't adjust to hell without also adjusting to despair. Dufresne plays a cooler hand to bring about his redemption than Luke ever did because he has a wild card, a very wild card indeed, up his sleeve. It takes him twenty years to play it but when he does you feel as if you're watching the perfect illustration of Dylan Thomas's lines,

Light breaks where no sun shines;

Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart

Push in their tides.... The impossible is achieved and so becomes possible.

And that it all seems probable (at least while you're watching the movie) is a tribute to screenwriter-director Darabont, most especially to screenwriter Darabont, for his directing talent is entirely rooted in his writing. This isn't always the case with talented young moviemakers. When you see, say, one of Spike Lee's better jobs, you're watching a brilliant directorial talent often illuminating his script, just as often overriding it, sometimes even trying to obliterate it when the director senses that his own writing is inadequate. But in Shawshank every cut, every angle, every camera strophe is at one with the writing. I'm tempted to say that the direction simply is the writing and vice-versa, for there is never any discrepancy between what you see and the movement of the narrative. Even the occasional spectacular shot, like the helicopter's eye-view of the prison grounds near the beginning, isn't an isolated stunt but precisely the sweepingly objective look at this city of slaves that you need at the particular moment. Darabont is an artist who knows when to rein in his eloquence and when to let it loose. To see his film right after Natural Born Killers (see, Commonweal, October 7) is to realize the difference between moviemaking that tells and moviemaking that bedizens.

Let me call attention to two linked sequences. An old paroled convict, wonderfully played by James Whitmore, having realized that he can't adjust to life "outside," prepares to hang himself. In his dreary, halfway-house room, he climbs up to a beam and, instead of simply putting his head in the noose, takes out a knife. By keeping Whitmore's hands out of camera range while the ex-con does something with the knife, Darabont infuses our dread with sheer curiosity. Only after Whitmore hangs himself does the director reveal what he did with the knife, and this revelation deepens our sense of despair.

Much later in the movie Morgan Freeman is also paroled, also fails to adjust. His movement through civilian life parallels Whitmore's and he is even lodged in the same room. Freeman, too, climbs up to that beam with knife in hand and again the camera fails to take in what the ex-con is doing with it. But, this time, when we see this man's handiwork we are elated and despair is dispelled. The two linked sequences, accomplished by Darabont's inextricable talents of writing and directing, certify Andy Dufresne's guiding principle, "Get busy living or get busy dying."

Darabont is also a wonderful director of actors. The entire cast is sterling, but the two leading players, Robbins and Freeman, are particularly fine. Robbins, with his slightly dented, vaguely asymmetrical face, gives Dufresne a prep school spruceness with a core of steel. Robbins helps preserve Shawshank's tension by making Dufresne a man potentially vulnerable to a despair that he is determined to resist.

As Red, Morgan Freeman has an even more difficult role: the benevolent narrator trying to understand the hero for us. Red does so much observing and explaining that we may begin to wonder if he is really a character or just a device. Only at the end is Red Redding allowed to come into his own, and it's a tribute to Freeman that his massive presence and canny delivery of lines (and even cannier pauses) imbue Red with a complexity and attractiveness that keep us hooked from his first appearance to his last.

But The Shawshank Redemption isn't itself complex, just terribly moving. It has its faults. That the prison has a population apparently 98 percent Caucasian is a bit of sociological cowardice. All the villains are stereotypes. (There's no reason why villains shouldn't be well-rounded characters, yet remain utterly villainous. Think of Wes Studi's Magua in The Last of the Mohicans.) Though Robbins is excellent, he and his makeup artist haven't contrived to age Dufresne convincingly through twenty years of imprisonment. (Freeman seems to age in his very bones.) And all the coincidences that bring about Andy's false conviction and the subsequent revelation of the real murderer add up to a few coincidences too many.

Yet this movie finally earns the tears and applause that audiences are now bestowing on it. "Simplice ma buono," said Toscanini when he first read through Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings. Simple but good. That's The Shawshank Redemption.