There was a time until fairly recently that, with a handful of exceptions, the best Stephen King adaptations were the ones that weren’t based on supernatural horrors. Movies like Misery, The Shawshank Redemption, and Stand By Me showed the potential that King’s work could have if translated to the screen right, and not in the cheap, slapdash way that so many King adaptations of the 80s did. Among those films was The Green Mile, another adaptation written and directed by Shawshank‘s Frank Darabont. Now, I had somehow not seen this one from start to finish, and at three hours, it would require a major investment in time to take care of. This was, like As Good As It Gets, one of those movies my ex-wife would find on TV at random, put on when it was about halfway through, and maybe watch to the end, such that I quite frankly only saw about 75% of it and all from the middle.
However, The Green Mile is one of those movies that I don’t think I have ever heard anyone say a bad thing about, and if there’s anyone who knows his way around a Stephen King prison-set story, it’s Frank Darabont.
After a brief prologue where an old man named Paul Edgecomb talks to a new lady friend at his retirement home, we go back to a Depression-era prison in Louisiana. There, Paul (Tom Hanks) is a guard captain on death row, AKA the Green Mile. Most of Paul’s guards are good people, doing a job that requires keeping the prisoners more or less quiet and content because when those guys are quiet and content, it goes well for everyone, especially the guards. Yes, one new guy named Percy (Doug Hutchinson) appears to be more interesting in cruelty than anything else, but the rest are good men doing a job that a lot of people probably wouldn’t want. Into this prison steps the simple-minded John Coffey (the late Michael Clarke Duncan), a mountain of a man convicted of the kidnapping and brutal deaths of two young girls. Except Coffey seems far too gentle a man, someone afraid of the dark, and with what appears to be some sort of supernatural gift to heal others. What can the guards do for a man like this, especially as by all accounts, he is somehow guilty.
Clocking in as it does at three hours, this movie never seemed to actually waste time. It sets up characters, showing good and evil on both sides of the bars. Coffey may be innocent, but the same can’t be said for the other inmates, notably the seemingly senile Toot-Toot (Harry Dean Stanton) and the mouse-training Delacroix (Michael Jeter), a repentant fellow who follows the rules and gets along with everybody. But then, beyond Percy, is Wild Bill Wharton (Sam Rockwell), a psychotic madman of a prisoner who can’t seem to show anyone any respect, and the one character in the movie that will toss a racial slur in Coffey’s direction, a seemingly odd thing considering this is Depression-era Louisiana.
Seriously, there was a part of me that saw this movie as being a big fantasy, not so much for the supernatural healing powers John Coffey has so much as the white, shotgun-welding mob looking for the dead girls in the beginning of the movie somehow did not just straight-out kill Coffey themselves when they found him crying over the two corpses. I know that without Coffey’s being in the prison there’s no movie, but in a lesser film than this, I might have lost my suspension of disbelief right there.
Fortunately, this is that good a movie. Hanks is great as always in the decent everyman role, and the supporting cast has some real talent beyond those mentioned in the form of Bonnie Hunt as Hanks’ wife, James Cromwell as the warden, Patricia Clarkson as Cromwell’s wife, David Morse (who I never realized was so big before) as another guard and arguably Hanks’s closest friend. Heck, Hanks’s frequent costar Gary Senise even shows up for a single scene.
But this is, like Shawshank before it, a movie where a large cast of characters find a common humanity in the most inhumane of places. Yes, it is a bit more black-and-white in its worldview than Shawshank, but it’s still a powerful piece, particularly towards the end when the movie asks what the price is to witness the death of the most innocent of men. Whether Coffey’s power gifted or cursed Paul Edgecomb in the end, he stands as a witness to a man of tremendous gifts who couldn’t stand to stay in a world as bad as the one he lived in. You’d need to be made of stone not to feel something as the closing credits roll.
Grade: A
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