The Shawshank Redemption and Key Lime Pie

The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

I watch a lot of movies; as I told one of my classes one day, I probably watch a movie every day (one student actually asked me if it was the same movie…), but it’s true – I usually find time to watch at least one movie every day, and I still like to go see movies when they come out in actual movie theaters. Regardless, I am always caught out by something missing in my inner catalog -- a film student will mention a film and be surprised to hear that I haven’t seen it, usually something I know about but haven’t gotten around to seeing. There just aren’t enough hours in a day to ever catch up, especially since they keep making new movies every day.

Still, it’s a great moment when you find out that someone you know hasn’t seen one of your favorite films, especially when you know them well enough to know that they will love the film as much as you do. The next best thing is watching that movie with them in your sweats, hair in ponytails, eating great snacks. My sister Bonnie and I made a game attempt at recreating the cheese fries we love at Longhorn Steakhouse – a favorite stop after many a Christmas-shopping-ToysRUs/Target/PierOne extravaganza – but facing up to all the grease and cheese involved when you make them yourself is a bit of a thrill kill. However, Key lime pie, a family obsession of sorts, is never wrong. And the balance of the sweet and the sour is the perfect background to go with The Shawshank Redemption.

The underlying secret to Shawshank’s charm is that it’s narrated by one of the characters, and it sounds like Stephen King’s voice, or the way I imagine he would tell his own story, with a flutter of magic and whimsy under the surface of what is a very hard morality tale. In his books, King’s voice is a folksy, beer-on-the-porch guy who has lived to tell his tale. The film’s score takes that bluesy sensibility to the next level with musical highs and lows and songs that feel familiar even if on their listen, like the Ink Spots’ “If I Didn’t Care.” By the time you get to the last song, it feels like you’ve been there before, if only because the Shawshank theme has been used in commercials to sell inspirational, dramatic, or romantic films.

The narrator is Morgan Freeman, the voice of God (Bruce Almighty) and a believable stand-in for Stephen King’s storyteller, told in flashbacks in voiceover, but it’s not Books on Tape – there is some show, some tell. The original story’s narrator had red hair and people called him Red: “Maybe it's 'cause I'm Irish” – Freeman plays this line for ironic laughs when it comes up in the film. The beginning, middle and end are marked in the film with three separate parole hearings for Red, a construct made for movies where the audience is looking for cues as to where they are in the story.

Andy Dufresne is played by Tim Robbins, and he is so right in the part that it is hard to imagine the other actors they wanted instead: Tom Hanks, Kevin Costner, Tom Cruise, Nicolas Cage, Johnny Depp, Charlie Sheen, all actors with plenty of attitude. Robbins plays the enigmatic Andy with a low-key style, an anti-attitude, that works for the part.

As a kid, I found cynical, noir-ish prison movies on the late-night black and white B movies on TV – a young girl caught up in petty theft goes to prison scared and vulnerable, comes out after years of incarcerated one tough cookie – any hope you have for her soul and survival are whittled away to nothing by the time she gets out. I also liked this type of story in B magazines – one of them, in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, had a prisoner sawing away at the bars of his cell and replacing them as he went with fake cement made from the only bread and water he was given to live on. Guy breaks out and makes a swim for it – he was in Alcatraz or some place like it – and drowns, just hours before his pardon comes in at the prison. Whatever the outcome of the prison break or release, it always comes too late for something.

Shawshank turns out to be a tunneling-out story, which evokes the most primal of fears: crawling through the worst kind of (literal) shit imaginable, with the fear of rats and being buried alive, and an uncertainty of the final outcome. Red describes Andy's dream of escape and freedom as a "shitty pipe dream" which literally comes to pass. And without certainty of success either; as Red tells the story, Andy makes his escape, not knowing what would be at the end of the pipe – a heavy-gauge mesh screen would have been an unfunny joke. But when he emerges into the rain and turns his face up for absolution and baptism back into the free world, it’s a classic Stephen King moment, even though these details from the film aren’t in the novella.

The movie wanders away from the original story in a couple of places. A reader will accept an almost nonstop interior dialogue, tedious in film where you are always waiting for the next thing to happen. In a story, you can include a variety of minor characters who may or may not play a major role somewhere in the plot, and have them just dribble away into the book’s spine as background color. In a movie, particularly one where you introduce a cast of characters that you want your audience to identify and sympathize with – if only to set up gags and jokes for comic relief – the audience wants to know what happens to each of them by the end of the film, and to save the best revenge for the warden (the deliciously evil Bob Gunton). Shawshank’s frame story has shades of “The Body” (or if you saw the film, Stand By Me) that reveal Stephen King’s hand behind the curtain. Both stories are told in flashback, and both involve a narrator talking about a group of guys who face death and crime in a singular time and place, everyone goes their separate, mostly-tragic ways, and nobody walks away unchanged. In Shawshank, not everyone’s story is completed in the novella; the film completes more story arcs for the secondary characters.

Some characters from the film exit the story differently than the novella. The movie gives us a young guy that everybody likes, and an old guy that everybody likes, both characters extended dramatically in the film from how they appear in print. The young guy, Tommy (Gil Bellows from “Criminal Minds” and “Ally McBeal” – who got the part originally intended for Brad Pitt), who gets his GED thanks to Andy’s tutoring and provides shocking information about the crime Andy was framed for, is taken out of play by merely shipping him off to another prison. Expanding the dramatic importance of his character – by having the guy delivering food into the slot where Andy is in solitary confinement tell him, “The kid passed. C+.” gives the audience more of a stake in the character, as well as showing the other inmates’ solidarity with Andy. This doesn’t happen in the book. And although the evil warden comes to a bad end in the novella, it is not the visceral send off that the film builds up to and finally delivers.

Brooks, the old guy that everybody likes in the film (James Whitmore) is drawn with a more detailed pen in the movie as well. Brooks’ demise is shown visually in the film, with “Brooks Was Here” dug into the rafter where he hangs himself, where the book has him exit stage left, a sad end to a sad man, but no real details. Part of the effectiveness of “Brooks Was Here” scratched into the wood is Morgan Freeman’s Red following his footsteps to the same halfway house later, and scrawling “So Was Red” – but taking a different road. Again, not in the book….but works in the film.

Oftentimes, moviegoers have different expectations than readers, and film gives you an opportunity to increase the tension by showing something visually. My favorite scene, where Andy plays Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” – on a 33LP at that – and broadcasts it across the prison – appears nowhere in King’s written version, but it’s a powerful moment in the film, a crucial F-you moment, from a guy who has no power to flip anyone the proverbial bird. Three years after Shawshank, Roberto Begnini would use a similar plot device in Life is Beautiful when Guido plays an LP of the opera he attended with his wife before the war, turning the phonograph horn so that the sound travels to the part of the camp where she will hear it and know he is still alive and there is still hope. It works, because the idea of the soundtrack of your life swelling up in snippets is how we experience life. The metaphor of using it to communicate with others is clever and universal.

In the original story, there are a series of posters that cover the hole Andy is digging – we see Rita Hayworth and Marilyn Monroe and Raquel Welch on the wall of Andy’s cell in the film – but the final poster in the novella is Linda Ronstadt, not Raquel.

After a disappointing box office, Shawshank went on to be the most rented movie of 1995. The best things in life sometimes end up being made of stuff that seems completely prepackaged, until you recognize the value underneath its deceptive simplicity.

Key Lime Pie

There have been too m any bummer Key lime pie moments to count, where the restaurant server brings out an obvious imposter – a gelatin-based custard dyed green to jack up your expectations about how “lime” it was going to be, with the final insult – a twist from a regular (not a Key) lime, on the top.

A good Key lime pie should be a thick, dishwater dirty beige custard, dense and able to hold a gooey point when dropped off the pie server -- not whipped into an airy fluff. Extra points are given for graham cracker -- as opposed to vanilla wafer -- crust, and points are taken off for the presence of a fake-out green lime wedge garnish).

On a trip through Florida in 2003, I made it my mission to track down the ultimate Key Lime Pie. The award eventually went to Papa Joe’s Restaurant and Marina on Islamorada.  Second prize went to Mangrove Mama's on Sugarloaf Key, where the crust was a coarse crumble of what tasted like cinnamon graham crackers, which almost compensated for the (real, regular) lime garnish. After snarfing my way through the Key lime pies at the Islamorada Fish Company and The Key Lime Pie Factory in Islamorada, a divey-looking exterior in a strip mall with the best Key lime pie to be had at a storefront, which also sold assorted Key Krap -- candles, lotion, soaps, and after a forgettable breaded-and-deep-fried Key lime pie at yet another roadside dive, I finally discovered that every supermarket in south Florida stocked a freezer case full of Key lime pies to be hoarded and smuggled to the Northern states (if they lasted that long). Further, that the elements of a really excellent Key lime pie came from processed ingredients.

I mailed myself a postcard from Key West with a recipe for Key Lime Pie on the front of it, just to remind myself how easy they were to make (and how delicious things made from processed food items could actually be). Here’s what should go into a Key Lime Pie: one 14-ounce can of sweetened condensed milk, 4 egg yolks, 1 graham cracker crumb pie crust, 1/2 cup key lime juice, and whipped cream.

The sweetened condensed milk: You can make sweetened condensed milk from scratch if you want to. There are recipes for this online, involving milk and sugar, and a little bit of butter, boiled down to a syrupy sauce. On the other hand, the exact amount you need for a Key Lime Pie comes premeasured in convenient cans that you can keep in your pantry until you get the urge to make a pie. One can per pie, unless you double the recipe and use the larger pie crust, and fill up a few mini crusts to go with it.

The eggs: If you double this recipe, you are left with the prospect of what to do with the eight – count ‘em, eight – egg whites that you did not use for this recipe. You can put them in the refrigerator and slip them into regular eggs for breakfast for the rest of the week, like Andy disposing of cement dust hidden in his clothes into the prison yard. The good news is, unlike a recipe that requires egg whites where it is crucial not to get any yellow in the white, if your recipe calls for egg yolks, it is OK if some white gets into the yellow.

The crust: You can make your own graham cracker crust yourself, whirling some graham crackers to a dust and following the rest of the routine, but why bother when the elves in Keebler’s trees have already made you a crust? They even have a Supersize version and also a package of six mini-graham cracker crusts.

The limes: You can buy your own Key limes (tiny little marbles of limeness) and squeeze the juice yourself. You can find them fresh in Asian supermarkets, and you can even buy them online at amazon.com – but there is no need. Go to your own supermarket, and look for Nellie & Joe's Famous Key West Lime Juice from Concentrate. If it’s not next to the RealLemon with the juices, look in the aisle where they have tonic water and mixers – it may be sitting next to the Mojito mix in that aisle.

The whipped cream: You can buy your own whipping cream and whip it yourself with as little or as much sugar as you like, or you could just buy the aerosol can and be done with it. Or you can leave the cream off altogether, but I think the pie looks more finished with a frill of whipped cream ringing the edge.

After baking and cooling, you can freeze the pie for later. Even after you can’t stand it any more and start to dig into it, you can still put the remains back into the freezer for optimum shelf life (if there is any left).

Preheat your oven to 350F. Whisk together condensed milk and yolks in a bowl until combined well. Add juice and whisk until combined well (mixture will thicken slightly). Pour filling into crust and bake in middle of oven 15 minutes. Cool pie completely on rack (filling will set as it cools), then chill, covered, at least 8 hours. Top with whipped cream. Try not to eat the whole thing in one sitting.

Can be baked with a file inside, if you are so inclined J