The Green Mile Review (1999) (reviewed by Sandman)
Director: Frank Darabont
Writer: Frank Darabont (based on the novel by Stephen King)
Starring: Tom Hanks, Michael Clarke Duncan, David Morse, Bonnie Hunt, James Cromwell, Doug Hutchison, Sam Rockwell, Michael Jeter, Barry Pepper, Patricia Clarkson
Rating: R
Runtime: 189 minutes

There are movies you watch and forget about by the time you get to the car. Then there are movies that follow you home and sit down at the kitchen table like they belong there. The Green Mile is the second kind, and it has been sitting at my table ever since I first saw it.

Frank Darabont adapting Stephen King for the second time after The Shawshank Redemption is about as close to a guaranteed event as Hollywood has ever produced, and The Green Mile delivers on every bit of that promise. The story takes place in 1935 at Cold Mountain Penitentiary, where Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) runs death row, a stretch of corridor the guards have taken to calling the Green Mile on account of the faded green linoleum that leads from the cells to the electric chair. It is not a cheerful place. And then John Coffey arrives.

Coffey, played by the late Michael Clarke Duncan, is a mountain of a man convicted of raping and murdering two little girls. He comes in chains and he ducks under the door frame and he looks like exactly the kind of man you do not want on your cell block. Except from the first moment you see him, something is off. He’s scared of the dark. He cries. He has the eyes of someone who has seen too much pain in a world he can’t quite figure out. And as Edgecomb and his crew come to understand over the course of this film, John Coffey is no more capable of the crime he was convicted of than the mouse that Del keeps as a pet.

What follows is one of the great slow burns in American cinema. Darabont takes his time, and he earns every minute of a three-hour runtime that honestly does go by faster than it has any right to. The film builds its world carefully, filling the supporting cast with characters who feel like real people rather than plot furniture. Doug Hutchison as the sadistic Percy Wetmore is one of the great villains in a film full of them, a small man with borrowed power who is genuinely hard to watch in the best possible way. Sam Rockwell shows up as Wild Bill and chews scenery in a performance that announced he was going to be something special long before anyone was paying close enough attention.

But this movie belongs to two men. Tom Hanks, who I thought had been nominated for Best Actor here but was not (the Academy passed on him this year, which is a conversation unto itself), gives one of the most quietly devastating performances of his career as Edgecomb. There is a scene near the end involving an execution that is one of the most painful things I have ever watched unfold on a screen, and Hanks carries it on his face without saying a word. The man is simply the best there is.

And then there is Michael Clarke Duncan. The Academy got it right, nominating him for Best Supporting Actor. What Duncan does with John Coffey is extraordinary because the role could have so easily become a caricature, a magical gentle giant with no real inner life of his own. Instead, Duncan makes Coffey feel like the saddest and most complete human being in any room he occupies. There is one line near the end of the film that I will not repeat here because you need to hear it for yourself, but it has stuck with me for years and it always will.

The Green Mile was nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Picture, losing to American Beauty in a year that had no shortage of strong competition. The loss stings in retrospect. Not because American Beauty is a bad film, but because The Green Mile is the kind of movie that reminds you why movies matter in the first place.

I said when I first wrote about this that it deserved a more in-depth review. I meant it then and I mean it now. This is one of the finest films of the 1990s, full stop. If you do not like The Green Mile, I am not sure what to tell you, other than that I feel sorry for you and I hope things get better.

The Green Mile gets a five out of five: EXALTED.

If you enjoyed this one, check out our review of Public Enemies. You may also enjoy checking out the Gran Torino review.