The Green Mile, nominated for Best Picture of 1999, requires patience. It's a very slow-moving film, clocking in at just a bit more than three hours long. It has very little in the way of action sequences, and it's really very confined, for the most part, to a single cell block in a Louisiana prison. In fact, it's almost an hour into the film before you even find out a central point, one that is the key to the entire film's plot. And yet this is a mesmerizing film. It's quite a presentation of the ideas of faith and goodness.
Tom Hanks plays Paul Edgecomb, a guard on Death Row who comes to realize that he is in the presence of a miracle after the arrival of a very large convict named John Coffey, played by Michael Clarke Duncan. Edgecomb and his fellow guards are, with one notable exception, all good-hearted men. They seem to want to treat the prisoners with respect and dignity, unless the prisoners fail to deserve such treatment. Only one, really, does that, and he's played by Sam Rockwell doing a rather bad Gary Oldman version of a crazy convict. I suppose Rockwell's "Wild Bill" Wharton is meant to show the contrast between good and evil, but he does go a bit over the top at times.
Duncan, a giant of a man, plays John Coffey very simply and effectively. He's a man who only wants to do what he thinks is good, and he seems to possess the ability to know when someone good is in need. He realizes that Edgecomb is suffering from a bladder infection and asks the guard to come to his cell to talk to him. He grabs Edgecomb's crotch until the prison's lights start to get brighter and then what appear to be insects fly out of his mouth. It's a pretty stunning sight the first time you witness it; actually, it's a pretty stunning sight each time. What to do with John Coffey becomes a discussion for all of the guards after he brings back to life a mouse that a fellow prisoner has befriended. How does one behave when confronted with a miracle?
You're going to have a couple of very uncomfortable moments watching this film, so be warned. Three people are executed by the electric chair; they are on death row, after all. The filmmakers present each of these executions in pretty explicit detail. You'll learn a great deal about how executions took place during the early part of the 20th Century whether you want to or not. The second one, in particular, involving Michael Jeter's Del, who speaks with such an indecipherable accent that I had to keep rewinding, is the most gruesome, thanks to the aforementioned "bad guard," the aptly named Percy Wetmore. He's one of the true villains of the piece, something that John Coffey notices almost immediately.
The members of the cast are well chosen. In addition to Hanks and Duncan, I'd single out David Morse as one of the other guards, Brutus Howell. His character is nicknamed "Brutal," but really he's just a quiet man who takes his job very seriously. Warm-hearted Bonnie Hunt plays Edgecomb's wife, James Cromwell offers some stoic support as the prison warden, and Patricia Clarkson makes a brief but illuminating appearance as the warden's cancer-stricken wife. Percy Wetmore is played by Doug Hutchison, and he's so very good at playing someone with a rotten core. I suppose one could say that the good characters are "too" good and the bad ones "too" bad, but the actors infuse their parts with a real sense of humanity.
I didn't particularly enjoy the frame narrative involving the now-elderly Edgecomb telling his story to another resident of the retirement home where he stays. It doesn't seem necessary, and I think it actually lessens the impact of the overall story somewhat. I suppose the filmmakers wanted to have some sort of "reason" to start and end the narrative, but I think what happens on the Green Mile (the nickname for death row because of its green floor) is intriguing enough. It doesn't need anything more to make it a compelling story.
I hope people don't watch The Green Mile thinking that it's some sort of parable about religious faith. I don't think it has anything to do with any specific religion, really. In fact, John Coffey says that he doesn't even want a minister when it's time for his execution. There's a lot of talk here about what constitutes heaven and what might or might not be a miracle, but this doesn't seem to be a movie obsessed with pushing a particular religious agenda. It's more about our personal faith, what we choose to believe in or not believe in, about how we decide to live our lives.
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