The Orlando Sentinel from Orlando, Florida • Page 107

CALENDAR MOVIES ROCK ENTERTAINMENT Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins become friends in 'Shawshank Captivating 'Shawshank' rises above By Jay Boyar SENTINEL MOVIE CRITIC call a prison picture sarily captivating a compliment. isn't neces- But in the case of The Shawshank Redemption, it definitely is. In many ways, the new film (which opens locally today) is rather old-fashioned. In fact, most of its characters have equivalents in films from Birdman of Alcatraz (1962) to Brubaker (1980) to Weeds (1987). The hero, for example, is a strong-willed prisoner who naturally claims to have been wrongly accused.

Other characters include the well-connected prisoner who can get his hands on almost anything for a price, the sadistic prisoners, the even more sadistic guards, the corrupt warden and on and on. What makes this all seem fresh and, yes, captivating is the film's unusual tone. The 'The Shawshank Redemption' Cast: Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman, Bob Gunton, James Whitmore. Director and screenwriter: Frank Darabont. Cinematographer: Roger Deakins.

Running time: 2 hours, 22 minutes. Industry rating: (restricted). Parents' guide: Adult themes, profanity, violence, very brief nudity. Reviewing key: excellent, good, average, poor, awful Shawshank Redemption is both resigned and inspirational, grittily realistic and vaguely surreal, matter-of-fact and operatic. Somehow, these opposites are combined into a remarkably smooth and lyrical composition.

It's a bit of a fairy tale, really, a terrific yarn spun by a master storyteller. Based on the Stephen King novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, the story begins in the mid-1940s and spans two decades. The plot is set in motion when a young bank executive named Andy Dufresne is given back-to-back life sentences for the murder of his unfaithful wife and the golf Tim Robbins' spirit lives in left field By Glenn Lovell SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS 3265. ORONTO There are usually two paths to consider, the primrose one and the rocky. You can either go with the current or fight it.

You can do something loony and out there, like Bull Durham, or something more sullen and conventional, like Eight Men Out. It all comes down to choices, reckons Tim Robbins, appearing recently at the Toronto International Film Festival to help sell his new vehicle, an old-fashioned prison picture with the unlikely title The Shawshank Redemption. And Robbins, whose credits range from the embarrassing (Howard the Duck) to the sublime directorial debut. He played a folk-singing demagogue in that one. Upcoming for the actor are IQ, a romantic comedy with Meg Ryan and Walter Matthau as Einstein, and another Altman, Pret-a-Porter.

In the latter, he plays a Robbins sportswriter covering a murder at a Paris Robbins (Robert Altman's The Player), already has made his share of left-field choices. "I'm always at a crossroads," he says. "Will it be this big commercial thing, or will it be this thing that's going to pay me an eighth of what I can make? You say, 'I'll go with that one. I have enough But the small one leads to something huge. "I don't have a master plan.

I don't know that I've made all the right decisions, but I'm not complaining, and I'm certainly very comfortable where I am." That's an understatement. Discerning filmmakers can't get enough of Robbins, 35, the guy with the goofy smile and the gangly Jimmy Stewart physique. He's a sort of brainy Everyman whose filmography reads like a cultist's wish list. Besides Altman's Short Cuts and The Player, Robbins has starred in Rob Reiner's The Sure Thing, the Con brothers' Hudsucker Proxy, Tony Bill's Five Corners, Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder and that definitive MTV spoof no one saw, Tapeheads. And don't forget Bob Roberts, the political satire with which Robbins made his head-turning REVIEW pro with whom she had been sleeping.

Andy winds up at Shawshank State Prison, a maximum-security institution in the state of Maine. The film tells the story of how his indomitable spirit and intelligence help him to survive those soul-deadening circumstances. With material like this, there's a terrible potential for sentimentality. Helping to keep things honest is the movie's narrator, the tough, levelheaded Red Redding a prisoner with outside connections who takes a liking to our hero. Morgan Freeman (Driving Miss Daisy), who plays Red, narrates the movie so dryly that he might almost be talking about the weather.

His delivery is so unemphatic that you don't feel coerced into experiencing the emotions that you do. As Andy, Tim Robbins (The Player) projects a cold, slightly out-of-it personality. This approach to the character, while anything but pushy, makes you eager to discover more about him. Of the cast members, the one who comes closest to a naked plea for sympathy is James Whitmore, who plays the prison librarian an oldtimer who has become so institutionalized that he can no longer imagine any other way of life. Yet even Whitmore achieves a certain emotional remove a distance that helps to preserve the movie's fairy-tale atmosphere.

The Shawshank Redemption (cumbersome ti- See SHAWSHANK, Page 22 fashion show. He becomes romantically involved with Julia Roberts. Forget about content, Robbins muses, those titles alone are enough to choke your average filmgoer. "Shawshank Redemption Hudsucker Proxy Pret-a-Porter. What is it about me and these titles," he says, wincing.

Shawshank, taken from a Stephen King novella, is Robbins' bid for a more mainstream acFu- It comes off as a for eggheads. He plays a banker who survives by his wits when imprisoned for his wife's murder. He co-stars with See ROBBINS, Page 22 Movie shows other side of Stephen King's writing People who think of Ste- men one, a soft-spoken phen King only as a horror Maine banker who is convictwriter may be surprised to ed of a double murder and learn that The Shawshank the other a life-termer at Redemption is based on a Shawshank State Prison in King work. Maine. Frank Dara- "King writes people SO bont adapted his screenplay well, and he's so good with from the King novella Rita narrative," says Darabont, Hayworth and the Shaw- who adapted a King short stoshank Redemption, which ap- ry for the 1983 PBS short A peared in the author's 1982 Woman in the Room.

"He best seller Different Seasons. tells a great story, and what I The same book also produced found compelling about this the 1986 hit film Stand by one was the underlying mesMe. sage about the human spirit. The new film follows the It gives you something to relationship between two think romantically acFu- a his his 22 $661 'ELOct. Calendar.