A Joint Enterprise

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Revenge is a dish best served cold. And as coolers go, it's hard to think of anyplace more chilling than Shawshank, the fictional state reformatory to which Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) is sentenced to serve two consecutive life terms for murdering his wife and her lover.

Its architectural style is Victorian Gothic, its penology just plain gothic. Or maybe Visigothic. It is a place designed not to reform but to drive you crazy. Cool is what you need to survive here, and supercool is what you need to maintain a semblance of humanity. Andy, who insists he has been wrongly convicted, looks fragile. But he has a lot of tensile strength, as the joint's brutal homosexual ring ultimately finds out. He has even more mental strength, patiently working up -- for 19 years -- an escape attempt that will not only bring down the insufferably pious and hypocritical warden Norton (Bob Gunton, an oil slick in shoes) but also turn a tidy profit for him and his best friend, Red Redding (Morgan Freeman).

Andy was a banker on the outside, trained to take the long, interest-bearing view, and he's well played by Robbins, an actor who once made an agreeable specialty of nutsiness but is even better at bland scheming. He makes his way in prison society by doing tax work for the screws, ultimately making himself invaluable to the crooked warden and a source of solid ironic humor to the audience. Even so, his character could not survive without Red's example. Red is the guy who can get you anything, from a pack of butts to a movie-star poster. He's all self-containment, never raising his voice or anyone's suspicions about his activities. And Freeman, who is simply a great actor, a man who has never struck a false note in his career, both narrates this tale and anchors it with his authoritative playing.

The movie needs the kind of authenticity that Freeman brings to it. The Shawshank Redemption is based on a Stephen King novella that is just a little too smooth for its own good. It's satisfying to watch all the book's moving parts mesh, but a certain lifelike uncertainty is sacrificed to the neatness. Happily, writer-director Frank Darabont understands this. He makes you feel the maddening pace of prison time without letting his picture succumb to it. He is also efficient and clever with secondary characters like James Whitmore's con librarian, who's been in so long he can't survive on the outside.

There may be something redemptive in this story -- a triumph of the tormented human spirit and all that -- but neither Darabont nor the actors overplay the point. They are content to update the old prison genre deftly and unpretentiously. It always did work when it was done well, and it still does; and if using Redemption in the title instead of the more accurate Revenge helps to bring in the upwardly mobile, who cares? James Cagney would have felt right at home in Shawshank.