The Green Mile (6/10)
Writer-director Frank Darabont has obviously got a thing about inspirational period prison dramas based on Stephen King stories. With The Shawshank Redemption, he made a film which, although not a great commercial success on its original release, has since had a strange cultural impact, making it onto many moviegoers' lists of all-time favourites. With The Green Mile, Darabont has taken a superficially similar King story and tried to tap into the same popular appetite for uplifting tales of decent human beings rising above brutality and injustice, but I think The Green Mile will disappoint many admirers of Shawshank.
Tom Hanks stars as a death row prison guard who takes delivery of an unusual new inmate to await execution - a gentle and slow-witted black giant (played by Michael Clarke Duncan) convicted of the murder of two young white girls. The prison regime, with its mundane distractions filling time between the horrifying electrocutions, is nicely developed and impeccably crafted. Then the relationship between the guard and his new charge takes a mystical turn, at which point the film basically falls apart, and none of the top-drawer production design, acting and photography on display can save it.
Apart from Kubrick's The Shining, which King hated, I've always thought that the films based on King's non-spooky stories, such as Shawshank and Stand By Me, have worked better than those inspired by his supernatural tales. But with The Green Mile, we get an ill-judged mixture of the magical and the earthly. First, we're asked to accept that rather than sitting in a multiplex surrounded by popcorn-munching filmgoers, we are in a prison in 1930s Louisiana. Fine. I'll go along with that. That's what I'm here for. Then, disbelief nicely suspended, we are asked to abandon the alternative reality we've agreed to inhabit and construct a new one so we can swallow a bunch of miracles, complete with bright lights and spooky manifestations. Give me a break. In fantasy films, the impossible thing we're meant to believe in for a couple of hours must be introduced, or at least alluded to, from the start so we have a chance to get used to the idea and give ourselves over to it. Introducing unexpected miraculous elements into an established earthly story is to trample on well-established conventions. Imagine an episode of NYPD Blue in which Andy Sipowitz is abducted by aliens. Doesn't work, does it? Even if the mystical thrust of the story had been established from the start, our credulity would still have been severely tested by the sheer niceness of the prison staff - apart from one enjoyably sadistic and slimy guard (played by Doug Hutchison) they are probably the most thoughtful and decent bunch every to fry people for living.
Although beautifully made, The Green Mile is let down by its bolted-on mystical elements and its crude religious allegory. It also suffers from the sort of sentimentality that Steven Spielberg is criticised for, often unfairly. After a bum-numbing three hours plus, I felt I'd served my time and was glad to be released.
--
Gary Jones
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