Andy Dufresne was sentenced to a lifetime in prison for murdering his unfaithful wife and the man she cheated on. Despite his claims of innocence, he is still sent to the hardest prison, Shawshank, in the year 1947.
The film began with the calm and introverted Andy Dufresne, the vice president of a large bank in Portland, getting sent to the Shawshank prison for the murders he committed. A crime which he never committed. Andy impressed many of his inmates from the day he came, one of them being Ellis Redding, also called ‘Red’, who was also serving a life sentence for murder. Red was also known as ‘the man who could smuggle anything in’. Andy took the chance to ask him to do him a favor; to get him a small rock hammer and a large poster of Rita Hayworth. However, the prison wasn’t a charming and easy place. Shawshank had a brutal and violent environment that consisted of unforgiving guards, threats, and repeated instances of sexual abuse.
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Early on Andy became the victim of abuse, targeted by a group of criminals in prison called the ‘Sisters’, whose leader was called Bogs Diamond. Years went along and the director of the Shawshank prison found out about Andy’s talent and thought that he could use him to conceal some of his illegal financial activities. With Warden protecting Andy, the rest of the people in prison never dared to mess with him, ever again. He started working in the prison library to assist the elder man, Brooks Hatlen. Since Andy got this job, he was responsible for writing weekly letters to the government, asking for books and funds to help to build a prison library. He never got an answer, so he patiently continued sending letters for 6 years, until he finally succeeded.
In 1965 Tommy Williams arrived at the Shawshank prison for stealing TV sets. He was married, and also had a baby daughter. Andy became his new friend and the tutor he needed to learn how to read and write. It turned that Tommy knew who the real murder of his wife and her lover was. Andy thought that he finally was going to be a free man again, informed Warden with this information. Warden refused to listen because he understood that he needed to protect his investment. That’s why he sent Andy to solitary confinement for 2 months and had Tommy killed.
In 1966, after he had spent 19 years of his life behind walls, Andy decided he had been there long enough, and that it was time to act if he wanted to get out of here. Starting in the second year of his life sentence, it took Andy Dufresne nearly 18 years to tunnel his way to freedom with a rock hammer. So, no one would understand what he was doing, he covered the deep hole with his posters. He waited for the perfect night where he could take the chance of escaping. After he stole Warden’s shoes and suit, he crawled through his cell tunnel, and later on crawled through 500 yards (the same as half a kilometer), which led him to a river.
The next day, Andy walked into many Banks posing as an imaginary person ‘Rendall Stephens’, to collect 370 000 dollars of the Warden’s money. In addition to e-mailing the evidence of his innocence on the ‘Daily Bugle’ newspaper. After that, he fled to Mexico to build a new life, where he would never be looked for. He saw his innocence, something that the world didn’t. But a man with a future has nothing to lose.
The movie ended up happily with Warden committing suicide, and Byron Hadley getting arrested. Red reunited with Andy on a beach Zihuatanejo in Mexico. The movie isn’t based on a true story, however, it’s a film about believing in hope in an unequal world, such as we live in now.
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