The Green Mile Review
by James Sanford (jamessanford AT earthlink DOT net)December 19th, 1999
The last time director Frank Darabont tackled a story by Stephen King, the result was 1994's "The Shawshank Redemption," a glorious emotional rollercoaster of a movie that never got its due at the Oscars or at the box office; "Forrest Gump" was all the rage that year.
"The Green Mile," adapted from King's hugely popular serialized novel, returns Darabont to the prison milieu of "Shawshank" and, as a ticket selling incentive, he has managed to land "Gump" star Tom Hanks for the role of Paul Edgecomb, the conscientious guard who learns a priceless lesson about life while working on death-row. The mostly first-rate supporting cast includes David Morse, James Cromwell, Bonnie Hunt and Michael Clarke Duncan.
Judged purely on its own merits, "Mile" is an entertaining, extremely well-produced drama. It's also a film that's likely to be enormously overrated by the millions of members of the Cult of Tom, that sect which refused to admit "Saving Private Ryan" had some serious flaws. Like "Ryan," "Mile" has dozens of shots of Hanks looking earnest or mildly dismayed, a similarly clunky flashback structure (lifted directed from King's pages), a tendency toward lengthiness, and too many characters who never truly come to life. Michael Jeter's fey Eduard Delacroix, for example, is taken straight from the actor's well-worn bag of tics, while Doug Hutchison's Percy never evolves beyond a spoiled, malevolent rich kid.
"Mile" also displays a borderline-irritating tendency toward clearly spelling out what emotion we're meant to feel at any given time, particularly in the scenes involving Duncan's John Coffy, a towering child-man whose dialogue and behavior sometimes veer dangerously close to parody. Long before darabont gets around to having Coffey bathed in the pure white light of a movie projector bulb you're likely to have tired of the director and author's strenous attempts to turn this mountain of innocence into a stand-in for Jesus Christ.
Curiously, although Coffy becomes the focal point of "Mile," the film's most fascinating sections have little to do with him. Darabont seems to have been much more intrigued by the day-to-day operations of Edgecomb and his co-workers on "the green mile" (so named because the prison floor is "the color of faded limes") than by the supernatural twist the story ultimately takes.
The sequences of Edgecomb supervising the rehearsals for an execution and polishing "Old Sparky," the workers' nickname for the electric chair, are quietly arresting, whereas the scenes showing a man expelling disease from his body (he looks unfortunately like a backfiring Dustbuster) or generating so much power he causes the lightbulbs in his vicinity to shatter come off as overwrought.
Despite the movie's numerous missteps, however, "Mile" has a number of scenes in which you feel you've been transported back to Depression-era Georgia. Edgecomb's relationships with his understanding wife (a sweetly understated Hunt), his best friend Brutus (Morse, uniformly superb) and his deeply troubled boss (Cromwell) feel genuine. And, as he did in "Shawshank," Darabont exquisitely captures the claustrophobia of prison life. You can almost feel the unspoken sorrow and resignation hanging in the air. James Sanford
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
