3/2/2023 0 Comments Green mile![]() ![]() Tom Hanks is warm and affecting, but not too saccharine, as the lead prison guard. And as good as the movie is technically, the performances are even better. Darabont is a skilled director (and adapter) and this film stands as a towering achievement. If you aren't crying at least once, then you should probably make sure there aren't wires coming out of the back of your head, because you really are a robot. Still, 'The Green Mile' is a gorgeously sweeping movie, full of wonderful characters and occasional horrors. Also, the old man Paul Edgecombe bookends that worked so well in the book because he was writing down his remembrances, seem less sound here, and while their inclusion seems somewhat essential, it could have been reworked some. There were some concessions made in bringing the novel to the screen, most notably the epic number of characters (both prisoners and guards) getting shortchanged in terms of development, and a third act shortcut that removes a nifty detective angle to Edgecombe's character, but the movie is already seen as being overlong (three hours). Jingles and his relationship with inmate Edward Delacroix (played by the late Michael Jeter), a murderer and arsonist. ![]() The main moral conflict in the movie comes down to Edgecombe and the other guards (even the warden, played by James Cromwell) all knowing that Coffey is more than innocent - he's quite obviously a messianic stand-in - and still sentencing him to, in the film's words, "ride the lightning." It's a tender, heartbreaking story of guilt and conscious that also acts as an oversized melodrama, with so many subplots that I haven't even mentioned, like the arrival of Sam Rockwell's "Wild Bill," a multiple murderer, arriving on the Mile, and the little mouse Mr. There also seems to be something positively otherworldly about Coffey - he seems to have a set of supernatural powers that are impossible to ignore. The only problem is that, almost from the moment he shows up, Edgecombe wonders if such a man - huge, for sure, but tender and sympathetic - could be capable of such a heinous crime. But everything changes when John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan) shows up on the Mile.Ĭoffey is a 7-foot black man with little education, who was convicted of murdering two young white girls and is sentenced to die. 'The Green Mile' is the story of Paul Edgecombe (a very leading man-y Tom Hanks), who works as a prison guard on death row, which the guards call the Green Mile because, to quote both the book and the movie, "it was the color of faded limes." It's here on the Mile that he has to contest with a slimy, dangerous guard named Percy Wetmore (Doug Hutchison) as well as the wear and tear on your soul when you send somebody to the electric chair day in and day out. Each month meant another 90 to 100 pages of one of the best Stephen King stories ever, and that really was a thrill. It could also be because I went on the whole 'Green Mile' journey, picking up each installment of the serialized novel as they were being released, which was truly a one-of-a-kind experience and added to the overall Dickensian feeling of the piece. ![]() I'm sure I'm in the minority here, but of Frank Darabont's two Depression-era Stephen King prison movies, I actually prefer 'The Green Mile' over 'The Shawshank Redemption.' The main reason is that while 'Shawshank Redemption' indulged in every prison movie cliché in the book, 'The Green Mile' was happy to sidestep them, going instead for a mystical and weird (and admittedly sometimes too on-the-nose) allegory in a truly bleak place. ![]()
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