The Green Mile (1999)
The second of Frank Darabont’s Stephen King adaptations takes the popular six-part serial novel and consolidates it into one, lengthy dramatic film. Its success is borne of the fact that Darabont is able to drill down through layers of subplot to find the core idea behind the tale – keeping that at the heart of the action in his movie.
Like Stand By Me and The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile takes the form of a flashback – told by the elderly Paul Edgecombe (Dabbs Greer) to his friend, Elaine Connelly (Eve Brent). They’re in an assisted-living facility in Louisiana in the present day, watching the film Top Hat – and Edgecombe begins to cry at the memories it sparks for him. Explaining his emotional response, he relates the story of his time as a prison officer in charge of Death Row, back in 1935.
Edgecombe’s story revolves around his younger self (Tom Hanks) and his team taking custody of a new inmate on Death Row – John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan). Coffey is a mentally disabled African American man who stands around 6 feet 5 inches tall, and has been convicted of raping and murdering two white girls. During his time on Death Row, Paul Edgecombe comes to doubt John Coffey’s conviction – particularly once he begins to demonstrate ‘supernatural’ healing abilities.
There develops a complex relationship between inmates and guards based around the notion of guilt and punishment. An especially sadistic guard tortures clearly guilty men, but is afflicted with a brain tumour transferred from a warden’s wife to him by John Coffey. This tumour causes his behaviour to deteriorate even more, and he shoots dead another inmate, who John Coffey psychically discovers was the real murderer of the two white girls. Paul Edgecombe comes to understand that, though Coffey was found with the bodies of the girls, he was trying to resurrect them using his healing abilities.
Coffey is still set to be executed, however, and quiets Edgecombe’s protests with the clear statement that he’s ready to die – wishing to be released from a cruel world. Watching the film Top Hat was Coffey’s last request, and the older Edgecombe is overcome by the memory of the inmate’s last evening spent enjoying the movie with the guards. The final reveal concerns the after-effect of Coffey’s healing abilities – in that those that have been healed by him then experience greater longevity. Edgecombe explains to Elaine that he’s actually 108 years old, and wonders how much longer he’ll last.
The Green Mile is a fascinating and challenging musing on the notions of guilt, innocence, morality, and mortality – framed by the social conflicts of 1930s America. Though in the source material, Stephen King returns to his use of incarceration as a plot device, Frank Darabont takes the same and creates an incisive commentary on the use of capital punishment, and the social infection of racism that still persists today.
