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The
Green Mile (1999)
 Maybe
"The Green Mile" is cosmic payback for all the lousy
movie adaptations Stephen King's fans have had to put up with
over the years. You can raise all kinds of legitimate
objections to Frank Darabont's film of King's sweeping fable
about an ambiguous, even tragic miracle that comes to death
row in a Louisiana prison in 1935 -- and, at a running time of
three full hours, it will certainly test holiday audiences'
gluteus muscles. But this is six-Kleenex Hollywood melodrama
of the highest order, a sumptuously appointed fantasy with a
core of genuine honesty and sadness. Yes, it's preachy and
moralistic, and it uneasily blends childish whimsy on one hand
with cruel horror on the other. These have been the qualities
of popular storytelling since prehistory, and "The Green
Mile" is above all a cracking good yarn that earns its
laughter, its wonder and its tears.
By most calculations, King
is the biggest-selling
novelist in the history of publishing. But his work has
translated to film with surprisingly indifferent results, in
both artistic and commercial terms. If you exclude the highly
individual interpretations of Brian De Palma's
"Carrie," Rob Reiner's "Stand by Me" and
Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining," most of the 49 King
adaptations made for film and television
(that's right!) have faded into forgettable cinematic
wallpaper, formula fare for night-owl cable viewers. (OK, we
should also make allowances for Kathy Bates' star turns in
Reiner's "Misery" and Taylor Hackford's
"Dolores Claiborne.") As for the horror-meister's
lone foray into directing his own work, the 1986 truck-monster
saga "Maximum Overdrive," the less said the better.
It often seemed that the movies
didn't get King on some fundamental level. His plots could be
boiled down to 90 minutes readily enough, but in so doing you
lost the tone of 19th-century corn pone melodrama and the
anguished moralizing that are so central to the experience of
King's mammoth tomes. Too many filmmakers think only about the
way things look and the way they work rather than what they
mean, and they failed to notice that King's horror is not
really about undead children, haunted hotels or rabid dogs but
human misery. But when Darabont, then a little-known writer
and director whose credits included screenplays for "The
Fly II" and "A Nightmare on Elm Street 3,"
adapted King's short story "Rita Hayworth and the
Shawshank Redemption" in 1994, everything changed.
Darabont's smashing success
directing Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman as resilient lifers
in "The Shawshank Redemption" marked the first time
King's sentimental sweep, leisurely pace and grandiose
symbolism had really made it from page to screen intact. I
suppose the period prison setting and similarly melancholic
tone of "The Green Mile" made Darabont the obvious
choice, but it's a much tougher challenge than "Shawshank,"
and the filmmaker has risen to it handsomely.
It helps that "The Green
Mile" is among the most overtly cinematic of King's
larger works, and that the author used its unorthodox form to
free himself from some of his more tiresome mid-career
obsessions. Published in six paperback installments in 1996 --
in an apparent tribute to the serial-novel tradition
popularized by King's hero, Charles Dickens -- "The Green
Mile" moves a long way from King's customary Maine
setting and avoids his '90s pseudo-feminism. It even has a
strong suggestion of religious allegory, a topic King
stringently avoided in his earlier work.
Inevitably, Darabont has
stripped King's present-day narrative, in which retired prison
guard Paul Edgecomb (veteran character actor Dabbs Greer),
confined to a nursing home and troubled by nightmares, begins
to reflect on what he witnessed 60 years earlier, down to the
barest of framing devices. This robs the film's conclusion --
when we learn the truth about why Paul finds himself so alone
in the 1990s -- of some of its pathos, but at least allows
Darabont to pack in most of the crucial details of the '30s
story.
As chief guard for E Block at
Cold Mountain prison, where condemned men wait to walk the
pale green corridor toward the electric chair, the younger
Paul (Tom Hanks) is a good man in an evil situation -- a
classic dilemma for a melodramatic hero. As tired as I am of
Hanks' roles as models of rock-stolid American rectitude, his
boyish yet middle-aged good looks are perfect here; Paul is
the moral linchpin around whom the grotesquerie of "The
Green Mile" swirls. He runs a tight ship, treating both
his subordinates and prisoners with respect and dispatching
the latter to the next world with a minimum of fuss. Paul's
men, especially his genial lieutenant whose ironic nickname is
Brutal (David Morse), follow his lead. Brutality and abuse are
not countenanced on the Green Mile.
If it seems far-fetched to
imagine a group of white death-row guards in the
Depression-era deep South as upstanding citizens virtually
devoid of bigotry or hatred, I would argue that King is
stretching plausibility to make a crucial point: The Green
Mile is a place where even the best men do bad things. There's
no explicit ideology about racism or capital punishment in
this movie, but there's also no mistaking the thickening
atmosphere of tangible menace, sadism and fear that Darabont
so effectively builds. The three grueling electrocution scenes
in "The Green Mile" should do more to sour its
viewers on the death penalty than any number of earnest
magazine articles -- don't bring your kids (or yourself) to
this movie expecting sugary clichés about the nobility of
death.
The cast of characters who meet
on the Green Mile in 1935 create a volatile brew that even the
phlegmatic Paul cannot control. Guards and prisoners alike
come straight out of the Victorian penny dreadful tradition.
Percy Wetmore (Doug Hutchison), a cocky young guard with a
mean streak, plans to use his state government connections to
ensure he personally supervises an execution. John Coffey
(Michael Clarke Duncan), a hulking black man convicted of
raping and murdering two white girls, is a sensitive,
simple-minded soul who cries in his cell at night. Eduard
Delacroix (Michael Jeter), a Cajun prisoner whose execution is
drawing near, has trained a remarkable pet mouse named Mr.
Jingles, who seems mysteriously able to evade capture. Wild
Bill (Sam Rockwell), a vicious, unrepentant killer with a
redneck swagger, assaults the guards, trashes his cell and
provokes conflict at every opportunity.
Managing this outstanding cast
and the almost luscious photography of David Tattersall with a
sure hand, Darabont refuses to be rushed, giving each of these
characters -- even the irresistible Mr. Jingles -- enough time
for us to invest in them. (Hating a character, as you will
undoubtedly hate Percy and Wild Bill, is after all a form of
caring about him.) Even the most problematic character, the
gentle giant Coffey, who sometimes borders on offensive racial
caricature in King's book, becomes a flesh-and-blood human
being in Duncan's dignified and sensitive portrayal. On the
other hand, the film's compressed plot means that Coffey's
apparent powers to heal the sick and punish the wicked -- and
hence his possible resemblance to another condemned man with
the same initials -- come into focus much more quickly, while
Paul's efforts to learn the story behind Coffey's crime seem
rather cursory.
From Coffey's near-erotic
ability to suck illness from people and expel it as a black
cloud of flies to Percy's disastrous scheme to torture
Delacroix in his final moments, "The Green Mile"
builds to a level of gothic intensity that mirrors the feeling
of King's fiction at its most spellbinding. Even if the story
loses some momentum in its drawn-out denouement, the
inexorable fate that ties Paul and Coffey together left the
audience around me sobbing. Like the best supernatural
stories, "The Green Mile" presents us with the
darkest questions of human life in outlandish and paradoxical
form. For Darabont and King, the Green Mile is a metaphorical
vision of the world, where we all wait for our names to be
called. It matters how we behave while we're there, but it's
hard to say why, since we're all guilty of something and we're
all leaving the same way.
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