The Shawshank Redemption is not the greatest film ever made. Heck, it’s not even one of best films of 1994 – the year of Pulp Fiction, Hoop Dreams, Chungking Express, Exotica, Quiz Show and the last two entries in Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy. And yet it continues to sit at or near the top of IMDb’s top 250, currently a shade above The Godfather and The Dark Knight, despite opening to polite reviews, middling box office and a resurgent Oscar campaign that nonetheless yielded zero awards. That’s an incredible comeback story, a video-and-cable-fueled long game as steady and methodical as, say, spending two decades chipping a hole in the prison walls with a rock hammer.
Much of the film’s standing in a site like the IMDb has to do with mass consensus, in this case about 3 million voters rallying around a drama that’s broadly loved, which would not happen for a film like the recent Sight & Sound critic’s poll winner Jeanne Dielman, a 200-minute temporal experiment that appeals to a narrower subset of viewers. Yet plenty of acclaimed studio movies are aimed at the largest audience possible, so it’s significant that The Shawshank Redemption still speaks profoundly to so many people 30 years later. There are any number of obvious reasons for that, starting with a Morgan Freeman performance that uses his serene gravitas as much for storytelling as it does for soulful character work.
