Get your own Free Home Page
Whether you think Stephen King is a hack or a genius, you must admit the guy has hooked a significant portion of the Western world on his storytelling. Though he's usually associated with the kind of horrific subject matter whose inclusion in a public school library often makes for animated PTA meetings when Mommy and Daddy find out, my guess is people simply appreciate his ability to write page-turning morality tales. His lines between good and evil tend to be comfortably distinct. Granted, those lines are usually toed by vampires, werewolves, ghosts, axe-murderers, aliens, killer St. Bernards, telekinetics, telepyretics, various Satanic minions, etc., which helps garner an audience, too. But so far, of the fifty or so movies and miniseries based on his work, the ones earning the best critical and popular reception -- Stand By Me, Misery, and The Shawshank Redemption -- were devoid of either supernatural content or excessive bloodletting.
Which makes The Green Mile all the more interesting. Based on King's six-part series of novels by the same name, it breaks new ground for the recuperating author by combining A-list talent (Tom Hanks, and Shawshank writer/director Frank Darabont) -- and the attendant A-list budget -- with a plot device that, though gentler than his usual inventions, still lands squarely in Weekly World News territory.
Hanks plays Paul Edgecomb, a 1935 Louisiana prison guard who runs his facility's death row, christened for its floor "the color of faded limes." He and most of his shift are remarkably well-adjusted, considering the omnipresent burden of minding men who for gruesome crimes are soon to die an equally ghastly death in the embrace of "Sparky," Cold Mountain Penitentiary's tried-and-true electric chair. This routine compromise with morbidity, as well as their very notions of reality, will be unseated by the mixing of a mouse, a nepot (I don’t think that's a word, but since a despot is someone involved with despotism, then shouldn't a person benefiting from nepotism be a nepot?), a conscienceless sociopath, and a gentle giant who works miracles. That's admittedly skimpy on exposition, but another King hallmark is tying up the plot in satisfying fashion.
Condensing six books into one movie is easier if liberties are taken with running time; The Green Mile is the latest member of the Three Hour Club. Darabont's script never drags, though, and the cast makes you wish there were an Oscar for Best Ensemble, because they are all excellent. Hanks, as usual, exudes Everyman humanity through dire circumstance, but it's the supporting cast who make it all work so well: David Morse, Barry Pepper (Saving Private Ryan), and Jeffrey DeMunn (Shawshank) as guards who, like soldiers in a foxhole, bond for survival's sake; Doug Hutchison (best known for playing the hibernating mutant Tooms in a couple "X-Files" episodes) as the weasely new guard; Sam Rockwell (Safe Men) as vicious convict "Wild Bill" Wharton; Bonnie Hunt as Edgecomb's gracious wife; James Cromwell as the warden; Michael Jeter as Cajun inmate/mouse trainer Eduard Delacroix; Dabbs Greer (best known as Rev. Alden from "Little House in the Prairie") as the older Paul, who bookends the story with some fantastical developments; Harry Dean Stanton in a great bit part as a cantankerous old trustee who stands-in for the condemned during dry-run rehearsals; and former Will Smith bodyguard and Armageddon costar, massive Michael Clarke Duncan as John Coffey.
Darabont has crafted a careful, deliberate film that gives each of these marvelous talents their due. And there's another nonexistent Oscar nomination he deserves, for Best Line, this one describing a character whose mind has gone away to summer camp: "I think this boy's cheese just slid off his cracker." A
Get your own Free Home Page