Review of The Green Mile (1999) by Filmclub — 27 Mar 2016

Frank Darabont emerges from his five-year hiatus after "The Shawshank Redemption" with "The Green Mile," an intermittently powerful and meticulously crafted drama that falls short of its full potential due to considerable over-length and some shopworn, simplistic notions at its center. Quite involving at its best and needlessly attenuated and self-consciously "inspiring" at its worst, pic has all the earmarks of a year-end prestige release, beginning with Tom Hanks at the top of a fine cast.

Working from King’s 1996 bestseller that was published in six serialized paperback installments, Darabont is nothing if not a fastidious storyteller dedicated to fulsome character detailing and sturdy structural carpentry.

In this new film, as in “Shawshank,” the writer-director proves very adept at lighting numerous long fuses that burn slowly through the yarn’s lengthy telling and finally pay off in some big moments, some more satisfying than others.

It’s a tribute to Darabont’s skill that he is able to sustain interest in these strands over such a long haul; it’s a reflection of his self-indulgence that he should think that this material warrants such doting elaboration.

Told as an epic flashback by a very elderly man who relates his long-secret story to a lady friend at a nursing home, tale is largely set within the modest confines of E block, or death row, at Cold Mountain Penitentiary in Louisiana in 1935.

Title refers to the shade of the faded linoleum on the floor of the facility, a well-kept bright brick building that resembles a small warehouse.

Presiding over the handful of inmates is head guard Paul Edgecomb (Hanks), a decent middle-aged man dedicated to maintaining as much calm and dignity as possible, given the dire circumstances of his prisoners.

On his staff are his loyal second-in-command, Brutus “Brutal” Howell (David Morse); sensitive greenhorn Dean Stanton (Barry Pepper); old pro Harry Terwilliger (Jeffrey DeMunn); and the group’s wild card, Percy Wetmore (Doug Hutchison), a shrimpy sadist who can get away with all manner of horrible behavior since he’s the son of the governor’s wife.

Behind bars at the outset are good-hearted Creole Eduard Delacroix (Michael Jeter) and repentant Native American murderer Arlen Bitterbuck (Graham Greene), who’s about to walk the mile to the electric chair.

Shortly joining them, and barely able to fit into his cell, is John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan), a towering, heavily muscled black man who’s been convicted of killing two little girls. Belying Coffey’s menacing look, however, is his demeanor, which is unvaryingly sweet-natured, polite and openly vulnerable; the greatest concern of this illiterate, childlike giant is that some lights be left on at night since he’s afraid of the dark.

Typical of Darabont’s deliberate approach is the detail with which he presents the rehearsal for the Indian’s execution. A morbidly tense and riveting sequence reveals a startlingly makeshift-looking electric chair and what it takes to successfully put a prisoner to death.

So, between the opposite poles of good and evil repped by the saintly simpleton Coffey on the one hand and the maniacal Wharton and Percy on the other, Darabont begins heavily developing thoughts about the extremes of which human beings are capable, as represented by their ability to give life and take it away.

While “The Green Mile” often grabs, and generally holds, one’s attention through the long journey, there are any number of sequences that could have been tightened or eliminated in the interests of storytelling dispatch. Darabont’s technique readily sustains the thoroughness with which he develops scenes, but his points would still be clear enough without the epic treatment.

And while Hutchison and Rockwell create deliciously hateable figures of pure evil, and Duncan elicits appropriately massive sympathy with his pivotal performance as the agent of goodness, these characters never grow multi-dimensionally and are ultimately more symbolic than credibly real.

All the same, the ensemble acting is of a high order. Hanks excels as the prison guard who is well balanced enough to nearly always handle his many troubles in proper, imaginative fashion.

Along with Duncan, all the other actors playing doomed inmates get their big moments to shine, with Jeter blending courage with emotional fragility as Delacroix.

Percy aside, the prison officials are all portrayed as fundamentally upstanding. Gary Sinise is commanding in his one scene as an attorney who gives his views on Coffey to Edgecomb.

Within individual scenes, Richard Francis-Bruce’s editing is impeccably precise in obtaining maximum values, while Thomas Newman’s generally strong score occasionally slips over-stressed grandeur.