Freeze Frame #140: The Shawshank Redemption

First things first. If you haven’t watched The Shawshank Redemption so far, please do the following:

1. Compulsory: Find a DVD of the movie and watch it. If you happen to live in a small town where the only available copy of the DVD is with a curmudgeonly octagenarian neighbour of yours who insists on watching it every night and wouldn’t even dream of giving it to you, even for a few hours, go online and order yourself a copy. I know you were expecting me to suggest that you kill that cranky old coot, but remember: any man who would watch this movie every night deserves to live, whatever his other qualities.
2. Optional: Once you’ve finished Step 1, consider reading the rest of this post. I plan to discuss a big spoiler here, so don’t tell me you haven’t been warned.

I’m serious about this, okay? Really, don’t read this unless you’ve seen the movie.

Now that the formalities have been dispensed with, let me get on with it.

The Shawshank Redemption spends most of its running time in establishing the steady rhythm of prison life. Even the establishment of Andy’s innocence and the jailer’s subsequent cover-up is done without unseemly haste. By giving itself space to breathe, the movie draws us in so surely that we find ourselves as “institutionalized” as the inmates themselves.

Apart from the pacing, which is a brave choice for a Hollywood movie, the other interesting choice is the use of a voiceover narrative. That the voice is that of Morgan Freeman, who plays one of the inmates and Andy’s closest friend, is definitely a plus. But narratives in general are tricky: if you don’t do it right, it would just seem like you just didn’t write the scenes well enough and needed the help of a narrator to explain things.

If you’ve read the Stephen King novella on which the movie is based (Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption), you will notice that the narrative follows the novel’s text to a good extent. A lot of it is in terms of commentary on a particular scene. In the one where Andy locks himself up in the room with the public address system and plays a Mozart opera on the loudspeakers, Red (Freeman) says:

I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.

Now, this is beautiful prose, but it doesn’t add anything to what you already realize when you see what happens. Like I said, redundancy. But then, a curious thing happens. Maybe it’s the timbre of Freeman’s voice, but you grow used to hearing it in the background. You begin to look forward to it, even if all it provides is a postscript to the events unfolding on screen.

I didn’t notice this on my initial viewing. Not even in the next couple of times after that. But there was this moment recently, when I was watching the movie on TV, that it struck me. There is a scene where Andy seems to have lost all hope, after the warden ensures that the only man who could’ve helped exonerate him is silenced. Red learns that Andy is now is possession of a stout length of rope, and lies awake all night worrying about whether his friend might have been pushed too far. And sure enough, the next morning at roll call, Andy doesn’t step out of his cell.

Darabont paces this scene deliberately, drawing out the suspense until we finally see the inside of Andy’s cell and find nobody there. It is a nice little moment of surprise, because nothing has really prepared us for it. But that is all I felt at that moment: a bit of surprise. A little later, you hear Red’s voice, over a montage of shots of the subsequent manhunt:

In 1966, Andy Dufresne escaped from Shawshank prison.

Even today when I watch The Shawshank Redemption, I find that Andy’s escape really registers emotionally only after Red has said spoken of it. I guess in some ways, it’s another form of institutionalization.

 

Freeze Frame #139: Quiz Show

I watched Quiz Show on TV eons ago and thought it was a wonderful film. But over the years, my memory of it faded to the point where I could only remember one scene with clarity. Recently, when it came on TV again, I stuck around to watch that scene and then zapped on to other stuff.

The movie tells the story of the rise and fall of a quiz show named 21 which, it turns out, was rigged by its producers in order to get higher ratings. In the third act, when things slowly unravel for everyone involved in the show, there is a meeting between Richard Goodwin, the Congressional investigator probing the scam and Martin Rittenhome, the head of a pharmaceutical company which sponsored the show. The conversation features the sort of cynical truth-telling that we are probably quite used to by now:

You see, the audience didn’t tune in to watch some amazing display of intellectual ability. They just wanted to watch the money.

That Rittenhome is played by Martin Scorsese might have much to do with why I love this scene. Listening to Scorsese’s voice is almost as pleasurable as watching one of his best movies. But this isn’t just me being in love with how the man speaks.

To understand why this scene works so well, you have to listen to the movie rather than just see it. For two acts, the movie seduces you with softly spoken voices of well-mannered people. When you hear Herbert Stempel, the deposed quiz show champion, complain about the show being rigged, it seems like so much whining even though you realize that he is probably speaking the truth. John Turturro does a wonderful job with this character, and a big part of how his character is seen in the movie has to do with how he speaks with a rough, unpolished accent.

Goodwin, on the other hand, befriends the current champion Charles Van Doren — erudite, charming, born to a life of privilege. The movie is seen through Goodwin’s eyes, and his relationship with Van Doren is central to the movie. We, along with Goodwin, are charmed by the other man. We share his illusions about how the television business seems to work, even though we ought to know better. And when the illusion finally shatters, we share in his disillusionment. Again, even though we ought to know better.

Therefore, when the Scorsese character talks about what the show really meeant to the audiences, and when the Kevin Pollak character (who produces the show) talks about how they viewed the quiz show as entertainment and not an actual contest, the tone of these scenes is in stark contrast with the rest of the proceedings.

Rittenhome doesn’t tell us something we don’t know. He just reminds us of something we allowed ourselves to forget for the past 90 minutes.

 

Freeze Frame #138: Love Actually

There is nothing extraordinarily memorable about the movie, but if I’m stuck between watching Citizen Kane and Love Actually, I am likely to choose the latter as often as not.

To quote what is probably the best line in Some Like It Hot, nobody’s perfect.

I very often don’t watch this movie in one go — I just fast-forward to specific portions. Sometimes, I just follow one plotline from start to finish. Sometimes, it’s a specific scene. Like the one where Rowan Atkinson gift-wraps a necklace while Alan Rickman looks on. Or the one where Hugh Grant is first introduced to Natalie. Or any of Bill Nighy’s or Emma Thompson’s scenes. Sometimes all I need in order to make my day is a glimpse of Thompson’s smiling visage when Bye Bye Baby gets played at a funeral service.

But my favourite of all time is the one where Colin walks into an American bar. To quote Ebert’s description of this particular subplot:

There’s also one hopeful soloist who believes that if he flies to Milwaukee and walks into a bar he’ll find a friendly Wisconsin girl who thinks his British accent is so cute she’ll want to sleep with him. This turns out to be true.

Exactly how much this turns out to be true is, to me, the best part of this movie.

 

Freeze Frame #137: Pasumpon

I remember watching Pasumpon years ago on TV and thinking, there’s no earthly reason why this movie should work.

The son (Prabhu) of a zamindar is estranged from his mother (Radhika) for two decades because she remarried after her husband died. He grows into adulthood and still carries around that resentment, although by now it has become more of a habit than a conviction. Indeed his own actions as the local lawmaker are in favour of widow remarriage. It is only in the end, when his mother is on her deathbed, that he manages to swallow his pride and reconcile with her.

The entire movie is replete with scenes of dramatic excess. Take the timing of the reconciliation scene, for instance. The son finds out that his mother is seriously ill, and spends an entire night lying awake before walking over to her (and his stepfather’s) home. Why would he do this other than to draw out the tragedy?

And yet, the closing moments manage are so powerfully moving that it comes as a surprise. Nothing about the scene is surprising, you could second-guess every line of dialogue, subtlety isn’t even on the same continent… And yet it worked. Or is it just that I am an utter sap? (Most people who know me reasonably well would nod, smile and say yes, that’s exactly it. But humor me for a moment, will you?)

My choice of standout scene in the movie, however, wouldn’t be the aforementioned. It would be one that comes a bit earlier, where the son beats up a local goon who insults and hits his mother and half-brothers. At the end, he tells the goon that, if anyone has the right to beat up on his brothers, it would be himself.

I was midway through my groan when the camera panned to his mother’s face. As she is led away from there, she speaks in a voice tinged with such pride in her firstborn, yet such sadness at their separation… Two decades worth of price and sadness, distilled into two minutes of dialogue.

 

Freeze Frame #136: Pineapple Express

Right at the end of Pineapple Express — which follows Harold and Kumar Go to Whitecastle into the annals of the Improbably Good Stoner Movies — the three heroes have breakfast at a diner and unwind. I am no homophobe, but I believe that the only plausible human reaction to their conversation would be to laugh and say: “How gay!” I also believe that this is precisely the reaction the makers wanted to elicit.

What is interesting, though, is how David Gordon Green frames his shots. The guys are sitting at a table in a diner, two to one side and one to the other. Right behind their back is another customer eating breakfast at his table. In a number of frames, this guy is visible. It is obvious that he can hear the entire conversation. He has not appeared in any of the earlier scenes. So you expect one of the following things to happen:

1. The guy would turn out to have something to do with the plot, and would announce his presence and function at the appropriate moment.
2. He has nothing to do with the story, but is there simply to provide a reaction shot to the conversation.

Throughout the scene, I kept looking at the guy, wondering which of these it would be. I expected him to do something, anything. But he just sat there, eating his breakfast with nary an expression flitting across his features.

It was only after the scene got over that I realized how skilfully the director had been eliciting my reactions while keeping this seeming nonentity in the frame. There are times when you just gotta love being f***ed with like that.

 

Freeze Frame #134, #135: Taare Zameen Par

I confess to not being overly enthusiastic about watching Taare Zameen Par when it came out. I have no idea why. When I finally did see it a few months ago, I kept wondering why I had waited so long. It’s a wonderful movie about a dyslexic kid having trouble in school until a sympathetic art teacher comes along and helps him out.

I agree wholeheartedly with the assessment that the second half is painted in very broad strokes and has none of the subtlety and power of the first half. Still, despite the fact that I know I’m being manipulated, I don’t feel like dissing it. I guess I like being a puppet every once in a while.

Two sequences stand out for me. One is an extended sequence in the first half where Ishaan bunks school and walks around the city for a while before coming home. When this scene started, all sorts of alarm bells were ringing in my head. No kid his age should be out alone on the roads like this!

But after the first 30 seconds of fretting about the dangers of the situation, I settled down to see what he would do. And I was drawn in. There doesn’t seem to be any conscious design to what Ishaan stops to observe and what he passes by without a second glance. It would’ve been easy to make him observe only those things that emphasize his artistic bent of mind. But the movie doesn’t try to shoehorn any pattern into the situation. It wisely recognizes that, to a hyperactive kid (artistic inclinations or not), anything could be interesting.

One of the pleasures of going to the movies is to find ourselves in the company of fully realized characters. There are so many movie characters who race so breathlessly through the plot that they hardly stop by to say hello. When a movie takes five minutes (heck, a whole first half, come to think of it) to do that, it’s gratifying. It is this attention to detail that wins the movie enough brownie points to make up for the string-pulling in the second half.

The other scene that worked for me is this little reaction shot right towards the end, when the Principal of the boarding school is about to announce the winner of the school-wide painting contest. We know already, having seen so many movies, that Ishaan would win. When the Principal announces that the judge has chosen a student’s work over his teacher’s, we know exactly what he is talking about even before any names are mentioned.

But a reaction shot of the art teacher beginning to applaud before holding back and waiting for the actual announcement? Now that is interesting, isn’t it?

It is not surprising that the art teacher would’ve guessed who the principal was talking about. But how often do the makers figure on giving this particular reaction shot? Think about all those movies where a competitor overcomes great odds to win a contest with a supportive coach by his/her/their side. How often does this reaction get shown, no matter how obvious? It is only after you see the shot that you realize that yes, this is exactly how he would’ve reacted.

 

Freeze Frame #132, #133: Once

A man stands at a street corner with his guitar, singing. During the day, when people pass by and are likely to drop a coin or two into his box, he sings popular numbers that they may have heard. It is after dark that he starts singing his own stuff. Whether or not his music is to your taste is, I think, immaterial — it is impossible to ignore the way his intensity goes up a few notches when he is singing his own compositions. 

A woman approaches him. “Where is she?” she asks after a modicum of preliminaries about why he doesn’t sing stuff like this during the day. “She’s gone,” he replies. It is clear that music like this cannot come out of anything other than personal loss. She doesn’t know him, nor he her. This is a pretty personal conversation for two strangers to be having. 

It turns out eventually that she is a musician as well. And that, I think, is all you need to understand. Once is a movie about two people who fall in love while they make music together. But it is not so much about their “romance” as about the sense of camaraderie and respect that two people share when they find common ground in a particular activity. In that sense, it has much in common with The Girl With The Pearl Earring, that little gem of a movie about Johannes Vermeer’s famous painting. 

Two scenes really stand out for me. The first is the one where they play together for the first time. It is at a store that sells musical instruments, where she has a deal with the owner to come in and play the piano for an hour. She brings him along, and they play a song he wrote called Falling Slowly. He gives her a rough idea of the music, starts off slowly and lets her join in. They play tentatively at first, slowly getting used to another person sharing their space. And as they grow in confidence, the music begins to soar. As a scene that shows the developing bond between them, it is nothing short of perfect.

It also serves to set up a later solo where he is in his room, singing a song about his breakup with his girlfriend. Home video clippings of them together plays in the background. It is clear that he hasn’t still gotten over her. But as he sings, you hear her (the girl, not the ex-girlfriend) voice slowly coming in, providing the harmony to his lead vocals. A part of you recognizes this and says, “Yes, this feels about right.”

These days, there is at least one big budget Hollywood musical coming out every year. Most of the time, the music is just an excuse to stage a big production number. But every once in a while, a movie comes along to remind you that the music doesn’t need the help.

 

Freeze Frame #131: Kalloori

Something interesting is happening to Tamil village cinema these days. It is as if a bunch of directors have decided to throw away the Nattamai — Morai Maaman playbook and write a new one instead. This new cinema is defined, above all, by real characters. I could spend ages in the interiors of Tamil Nadu and not find a single individual similar to the ones Sarath Kumar and Vijayakanth play in their village movies. On the other hand, I could go to Periyar bus stand in Madurai, get into any bus going out of town and come across one of the guys I see in movies like Kalloori or Vennila Kabaddi Kuzhu. I cannot adequately express how refreshing that is.

Kalloori, for me, is a near-perfect example of how one could make a movie about a bunch of friends in college. It is not without its missteps, but none of them really stay in mind when the movie is over. What remains is the memory of spending two-odd hours in the company of real people from a village in Tamilnadu.

It is also the movie in which I got introduced to Tamanna Bhatia the actress. I had seen Tamanna the Babe in movies like Padikkadhavan where she did not, to borrow a phrase from Miss Congeniality, do anything better than convert Oxygen into Carbon Dioxide. But in Kalloori, she actually acts. And quite well at that.

She is well cast, to begin with. As the beautiful, fair-skinned city-bred outsider in a college full of rustic, dark-skinned people, she stands out. I am not being biased about skin color here — this is how the filmmakers want her to be perceived. In the context of the story, it works.

My favourite moment comes towards the end of the movie when Shobhana (Tamanna) finds out that Muthu (Akhil) reciprocates her feelings towards him. That it is done through that oldest of standbys — her handkerchief, treasured by him, falling out of his pocket at a critical juncture — is something I am willing to overlook in light of what follows.

Shobhana sees it, realizes what it means, and exults briefly before rearranging her features and joining a friend. That friend represents a complication of sorts — her views on mixing friendship and love is one reason why the couple refrain from expressing their feelings for one another. Cue a rather tearful conversation between the two girls, which seems to resolve things satisfactorily.

And then an ending that comes almost out of nowhere and changes everything. I am not going to reveal it here, but let me just say that it rules out the possibility of the couple singing happy songs in some scenic location somewhere.

Now think back to that moment where Shobhana spots that handkerchief. For Tamanna, it is a crucial moment because those three seconds are all she has to express her joy over her discovery. No songs, no scenes of her standing tall, looking up at the heavens and smiling while flowers rain down upon her and a thousand violins play in the background, nothing. Just a few seconds to herself where she needs to look like she’s bursting with joy. It is to her credit that she makes those seconds count.

A vast majority of our movies involve requited love, or at least require that both people know what the other is feeling, even if circumstances dictate that they can never be together. And where that cannot happen, there is much gnashing of teeth so that the audience knows exactly how much pain one of the protagonists is in. It is often overdone to the point where every bit of emotive power has been leeched out of the situation. The cardinal rule of storytelling is: Don’t tell the listener what to feel. Lead him there and let his mind do the rest. Amazing how few filmmakers understand this.

Which is why, when a filmmaker does it right as in Kalloori, it hits us so much harder.

ps: While on the subject, think about this: In Ghajini, if Sanjay had had the opportunity to tell Kalpana the truth about himself, do you think the flashback would still have been  as effective?

 

Freeze Frame #130: Juno

Most people, when they think about Juno, automatically smile because they remember some witty one-liner or the other. Me, I always end up remembering the scene that moved me to tears when I first saw it, and still manages to make my eyes glisten when I catch it on TV.

No, not the scene in the mall with Jennifer Garner, although it’s quite beautifully done. Especially by Garner, who in those three minutes manages to give a better account of her acting skills than she has in her entire career prior to that.

The one that always gets to me comes pretty much at the end, when Juno is lying in a hospital bed recuperating after her delivery. Her dad is by her side, stroking her hair. And he looks at her and says:

Someday you’ll be here, honey. On your terms.

A very dear friend of mine who wasn’t as crazy about the movie as I was, commented that it seemed to trivialize the whole teenage pregnancy issue. She had a valid point in some ways. Here’s a girl who had unprotected sex, got herself pregnant, decided to have the baby and gave it up for adoption when it was born. Where’s the joke in that?

I contend, however, that the process couldn’t have been painless for her. At some level she must’ve felt like she was making much bigger choices than she ought to have been making at that age, thanks to one decision in the beginning. Which is why the phrase On your terms feels so right.

 

Freeze Frame #129: Burn After Reading

The Brothers Coen do comedy like few others do: they do it in such a way that, half the time you don’t even realize that you should be laughing your ass off. This sort of statement would normally be an insult. With the Coens, it is simply a statement of fact, and a sort of compliment.

In Burn After Reading, they assemble an enviable cast in the service of a plot that seems quite serious (even the background score is suitably dramatic) until you realize that, when you wish to summarize it, you can’t get past “So there’s this guy…”

(I used to love writing long sentences in school. Even wrote a hundred-word answer on Mother Teresa’s service to humanity in three sentences, the second of which had 68 words. Some habits die hard.)

The beauty of it is, these serious plot developments involve characters who are utterly insignificant, even though they don’t realize it. The more they stay serious, the funnier it all gets. And all the while, an ominous background score plays in the background, and a mysterious black car keeps tailing one of the major characters. Most screwball comedies involve characters who are utterly serious about what they are trying to do, even if the world and its grandmother-in-law knows it’s crazy. This is no different, but the Coens pitch the proceedings at such a peculiarly serious note that you’re almost afraid to laugh, lest you be blamed for not taking it seriously.

Sometimes, a master criminal cannot resist confessing to his crime just so that the world would know he did it. The Coens seem to have succumbed to the same temptation by putting in a ridiculously simple plot device — scenes where a CIA honcho is trying to explain the plot developments to his boss, without much success. The boss is played by J. K. Simmons, who deserves an Oscar simply for not laughing out loud. By the time the last of those briefings came around, I pretty much began laughing as soon as the scene began and was guffawing by the end of it.

Chubb: Jesus. Jesus f***ing Christ. What did we learn, Palmer?

Palmer: I don’t know, sir.

Chubb: I don’t f***ing know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.

Palmer: Yes sir.

Chubb: Although I’m f***ed if I know what we did.

Palmer: Yes sir. Hard to say.

Chubb [shaking his head]: Jesus. Jesus f***ing Christ.