Robert Redford has always been a favourite of mine. He’s imminently watchable and very likeable on camera, and Brubaker was a film that was always on my radar but one I had never gotten around to.

Based on and inspired by true events, Redford plays Henry Brubaker, a reformist prison warden who has been hired for a small prison farm in Arkansas. But to understand why he’s been called in, he first decides to go undercover as a prisoner to see their living conditions and treatment.

And it’s appalling.

Their residence is shoddily built, they are forced to sell off their livestock to the local town, and the trustees are corrupt, keeping food for themselves, or selling it to the locals, while the prisoners eat meals that barely sustain them.

When a prisoner in solitary (played by Morgan Freeman in one of his first roles) breaks free and holds another prisoner hostage, Brubaker reveals himself and causes a political uproar. As he works to treat the prisoners with respect and give them a form of responsibility and self-governance, the locals no longer get all the bonuses and payoffs they used to, and that stirs up more trouble.

And when he hears that there may be a hidden grave full of prisoners who have been murdered by trustees, things get especially troublesome for Brubaker when he learns who his allies are, and if one man can make a difference.

Fantastically shot and told, there are a lot of familiar faces surrounding Redford, Yaphet Kotto, David Keith, Everett McGill, Murray Hamilton, Matt Clark, Wilford Brimley, M. Emmet Walsh, and Harry Groener.

Brubaker, and the film, make a very solid argument for the respectable treatment of prisoners, and how it remains a fine line to be walked. Taxpayers are responsible for prison upkeep, as well as food and shelter for the prisoners, who in their eyes, do nothing in return. The town was using them as slave labour, taking their food, and keeping them barely alive, but that is too far of an extreme the other way. There has to be a happy medium where prisoners pay for their crimes, but also contribute to society.

Brubaker doesn’t reach all the prisoners and trustees, there are a few who are set in their ways and their beliefs, but most of them react to the simple act of respect and responsibility, something that is echoed in Brubaker’s dealing with the political arena that forms around the changes he is starting to implement.

It’s a smart, thought-provoking film that received an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay, and Redford, as always, is wonderful to watch.

A powerful, smoothly paced and shot film that invests the viewer, and presents big ideas to ponder.