The Green Mile Retrospective

Last year we took a close look at The Shawshank Redemption and why it’s widely loved by so many people around the world. Now it’s time to revisit Frank Darabont’s other prison-based Stephen King movie, The Green Mile…

In the 1990s, Stephen King’s writing career took a subtle turn: The author moved away from the outright horror that had made him one of the best-selling writers of all time into more character-based fare such as Needful Things, Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne, and Rose Madder. During this period, The Shawshank Redemption became the first Best Picture nominee based on one of his stories, and he returned to the well with The Green Mile, published in six parts in 1996.

Needless to say, Hollywood’s number-one Stephen King fan Frank Darabont was on the case when the time came to adapt the novel into a potentially Oscar-friendly big screen version. Released in 1999, its chances were no doubt helped by the casting of Tom Hanks a few years after he scored back-to-back Academy Award wins for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, not to mention another Best Actor nod for Saving Private Ryan. But in a really strong year for cinema, could The Green Mile go one better and win the top prize?

The short answer is no – that honour fell to American Beauty, which has certainly aged worse than Darabont’s second time behind bars. But the film remains almost as popular as Shawshank, even if it always sat a little uncomfortably with me. I watched it again for the first time in maybe 20 years to figure out why.

The Green Mile opens in the present day as we meet Paul Edgecomb (Dabbs Greer), an affable senior living in a retirement home which seems very pleasant, apart from their tendency to play the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest soundtrack in the background. During the day, he takes long unsanctioned walks to a secretive destination in the hills, and it’s clear that he is troubled by something that happened many decades before.

We flash back to 1935 when Edgecomb (Tom Hanks in the younger role) was the supervisor of Death Row at Cold Mountain penitentiary, nicknamed the “Green Mile” on account of the colour of the floor. Paul runs a steady ship with the help of his colleagues Brutus Howell (David Morse), Dean Stanton (Barry Pepper), and Harry Terwilliger (Jeffrey DeMunn), but the harmony is disrupted by Percy Wetmore (Doug Hutchinson), a mean-spirited officer who loves antagonising the prisoners.

One day the gang receives an unusual new inmate: John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan), a mountainous African-American with the mind of a child who is sentenced to death for the sexual assault and murder of two young girls. Also on the Green Mile is Arlen Bitterbuck (Grahame Greene), a Native American who is the first to meet his maker via the electric chair; Eduard “Del” Delacroix (Michael Jeter), who makes friends with a supernaturally gifted mouse named Mr. Jingles; and latecomer “Wild Bill” Wharton (Sam Rockwell), a violent maniac who delights in causing trouble on the wing.

It soon becomes apparent that Mr. Jingles isn’t the only gifted inhabitant of the Mile. John first cures Paul’s painful bladder infection with his healing touch, then resurrects the mouse after Percy stomps him out of spite towards Del. The four nice officers want Percy gone, but he has friends in high places. He agrees to file for a transfer if Paul will allow him to run Del’s execution, which goes horrifically wrong when Percy sabotages the method.

Paul starts to think John might be innocent, and the hulking empath performs another miracle by absorbing a malignant brain tumour from the wife of Hal (James Cromwell), the prison warden. John also uses his powers to reveal the truth about the murder of the two young girls, and Paul belatedly offers to let him escape on the eve of his execution. But John is tired of all the pain in the world and quietly accepts his fate.

On the face of it, The Green Mile tries really hard to recreate the success of The Shawshank Redemption. Darabont enlisted Thomas Newman again for the score while cinematographer David Tattersall attempts to emulate the stellar work that Roger Deakins provided for the earlier film.

It’s pretty wild how many of the story beats are recycled from Shawshank. You’ve got the period setting and a murder that might not be the open-and-shut case it first seems; a falsely accused man who bears his injustice gracefully; a nutter who really committed the crime; bonding between a white guy and a black guy inside the walls of a gothic prison; an inmate with a cute pet; a sadistic screw who eventually gets his comeuppance; and a clip from a vintage movie that plays into the story (Top Hat this time around).

Offering more of the same with a little magic dust sprinkled on top certainly didn’t hurt The Green Mile. Aided by a better marketing campaign and a heavyweight Hollywood star like Tom Hanks, it made far more money at the box office and became the highest-grossing Stephen King adaptation until the It two-parter in 2017 and 2019. It also received critical acclaim and notched four Oscar nominations, including two more for Darabont (Best Picture with producer David Valdes and Best Adapted Screenplay).

The trouble with treading such familiar ground is that The Green Mile constantly reminds us what a superior film The Shawshank Redemption is. Don’t get me wrong, it is a very enjoyable movie – Darabont directs with his usual earnest zeal for Stephen King material and the performances are excellent across the board. Unlike many critics, I don’t even have a major issue with the whopping three-hour running time, which is admittedly excessive for a relatively slender morality tale. Tom Hanks defended the movie’s length, saying viewers got an “extra inning” for their dollar, and it’s hard to disagree – the whole thing is so expertly played that there is hardly a dull moment. It’s a great film for a rainy Sunday afternoon in that respect.

What bothers me are two things: How simplistic the story and characterisations are, and how the overall tone sits at odds with the message it conveys. 

Paul Edgecomb is the only character with a hint at more than two dimensions, which is especially galling when it comes to John Coffey. Michael Clarke Duncan’s performance is superb and he deserved his Oscar nomination, but he’s even more of a cipher than Andy Dufresne in Shawshank. He has no backstory other than the crime and he can hardly remember his past, with the narrative strongly hinting that he’s otherworldly in some way – or “dropped from the sky” as his defence attorney (Gary Sinise) suggests.

Although he’s the film’s pivotal character, however, we spend more time focusing on the antics of Mr. Jingles in the first hour than John. He’s clearly written to be martyred, and we know he’s toast from the moment we see him. There’s no possibility of a reprieve because the story demands that he dies.

That’s the point of the story, you might argue. But then there is the race issue. Spike Lee took issue with the film when he coined the term “magical negro” while criticising The Green Mile and others like it, such as The Legend of Bagger Vance. Lee argued that the magical negro is an extension of the old racist “noble savage” trope, in that writers and film-makers continue to utilise black characters whose sole purpose is to use their wisdom and mystical powers to help white folks.

In that sense, John Coffey is a literal example because that’s all he does in the film: Sits in the background until it’s time for him to selflessly help the white characters by curing their ailments, feeling their pain, and breathing their pet mice back to life. In return, the three-hour movie barely pays lip service to the hardships and prejudices an African-American man would’ve faced during the 1930s, apart from the odd N-word thrown in. 

It becomes even more frustrating when we see how little effort or imagination Paul and the other good guards put in to help him. Paul goes off on a side-quest to meet John’s defence lawyer, who (in one of the few unexpected beats) believes he is guilty. Apart from that, they just stand back and watch a bona fide miracle worker die. Frank Darabont said of John Coffey: "[He] represents those extraordinary, visionary souls that come along in human history from time to time, that the rest of us feel compelled to exterminate. I've always found it extraordinary that we just can't seem to accept the message of peace and love. It's not such a crackpot notion. But whenever somebody comes along who embodies that notion, we have to nail him to a cross, we have to shoot him, we have to kill him."

Okay, we get it – Coffey even has the same initials as the son of God. Symbolism is fine but the screenplay bends over backward to make its point, which feels jarringly at odds with the overall tone of the film. Apart from the three execution scenes, there is very little hardship in The Green Mile for the inmates, and the stylised production design means that the prison never registers as a real place where condemned men wait their turn to die.

Long stretches play out like a prison-bound hangout movie to some jaunty musical motifs by Thomas Newman. It’s all very jovial between the good characters and the inmates, and even Wild Bill is played in a broadly comic register by Sam Rockwell until a heinous (and very obvious) late reveal. No wonder Stephen King joked that The Green Mile feels like “the first R-rated Hallmark Hall of Fame production”.

So there’s the difference between The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile for me. Shawshank really puts us through such a tough time with the suffering that Andy Dufresne endures and the harsh treatment of the other inmates – we get suicide, brutal beatings, murder, corruption, and gang rape – but it is all in service of a life-affirming message. Like Andy, many of us have to crawl through rivers of raw sewage (figuratively, at least) in the hope of something better at the end of it, which is why the movie has struck such a chord with people across the globe. It galvanises us and encourages us to keep pushing forward even if things seem grim.

The Green Mile does the opposite. It’s all rather cosy until it ends with a real bummer of a message. John Coffey is a saint (or maybe an angel) and he doesn’t want to escape at the end because he’s seen how much the world sucks, and Paul is fated to live an abnormally long life carrying the guilt of not saving him. I can handle movies with downer endings, but I just don’t know what to do with that information when the film is dressed up as a mawkish fantasy which manipulatively wrings the tears out of us rather than earning them in a more authentic way.

So there you have it, my hot take on a very popular movie. Do you agree? Let us know!