Review

Told as a long — very long — flashback by a kindly man in a retirement home, The Green Mile is the mostly riveting, slightly overblown account of a few fascinating months on Death Row in a prison in the American South in 1935. Director Frank Darabont, working for the second time from a story by Steven King ( Darabont wrote and directed “The Shawshank Redemption”), has crafted a throughtfully layered physical and mystical adventure that unspools in small, carefully controlled increments.

Much has been made of the fact that this movie lasts 187 minutes — and certainly it could have been trimmed here and there. But the overall impression is not of length but depth. The characters are sometimes positioned just a tad too conveniently and fate is just a shred too accommodating, but the composite effect is of an ambitious yarn well told.

Death Row supervisor Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) is suffering from a bladder infection that makes each trip to the toilet as excrutiating as a condemned man’s final stroll to the electric chair. (On these specific premises, that final walk is made across pale green linoleum, hence the title.) Given the severity of his affliction, Paul can’t help but take notice when a colossus of a prisoner, a black man named John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan), grabs him by the crotch through his prison bars and seemingly siphons the infection out using his own massive frame as an intermediate step.

Following this unsolicited and frankly strange intervention, Paul and his wife Jan (Bonnie Hunt) spend a night in the sack livelier than since they were teens. Yep — John Coffy (whose initials are J.C., just like a noted historical figure with healing powers who met a less than comfortable end) seems to have worked a miracle.

Paul becomes convinced that Coffy couldn’t possibly be guilty of the crime of which he’s been convicted: the rape and murder of two young girls. But it’s the Depression and Paul is not the crusading type. He takes humane measures to treat his charges with dignity, but leaves the question of their proven guilt up to due process.

If some of the other Death Row residents are contrite in their final weeks, inmate "Wild Bill" Wharton (Sam Rockwell) is Evil with a capital “E”. Imaginatively evil. Evil for, well, the hell of it.

In the rotgut irredeemably nasty department, Billy has his counterpart on the “right” side of the law in prison guard Percy Wetmore (Doug Hutchison), a contrary runt who’s related to the Governor and whose future seems assured no matter how gratuitously vile he is towards the inmates and his co-corkers. Percy is a weasel whose long-in-coming comeuppance has a measure of poetic justice.

Even if it is fundamentally distasteful to strap down a man you’ve come to know, to wet a sponge, fasten it to his shaved pate and throw a switch that fries his innards and stops his heart, it’s the Depression and the guards are all happy to have steady work. Work they’re good at: the level of psychology appled in tandem by Paul and his sturdy second-in-command Brutus (David Morse) is impressive — and would be so even in a contemporary correctional institution.

Althogh it’s one of the dilemmas at the heart of the drama, the film doesn’t really have a point of view about capital punishment. The sequence in which a condemned man is electrocuted less-than-smoothly is conveyed so convincingly the viewer can almost smell charred flesh.

The cast is fine across the board. Any “Hey, wait a minute...” moments are dispersed before they can take hold, thanks to the combination of fine acting and well-placed special effects.

Paul’s relationship with his straight-shooting wife is especially satisfying — their love and comraderie is established in a few keen scenes.

Michael Jeter is quite fine as a Cajun killer who goes mushy over a mouse and teaches it to perform tricks Although it resembles his eerie score for Robert Altman’s The Player in places, Thomas Newman’s music is a nice fit and not intrusive.

If one wants to nit-pick, a crucial sequence in which John applies his gift to a terminally ill person off prison grounds, stretches credibility, given race realations, circa 1935. But that’s a quibble in a piece of work that suceeds so well on its own terms.

FilmFestivals.com reporter
Lisa Nesselson