Judges’ Comments: The Green Mile, Frank Darabont’s epic 1999 adaptation of Stephen King’s Death Row drama: the critic thought it a ‘masterpiece’ and argued ‘passionately’ in its favour. We also felt the reviewer ‘shined a nicely ironic eye on the subject matter’s outdated view on women and race, noting the imbalances but setting them in the context of time and place of the story in the Depression-era deep American South.’
The Green Mile (dir. Frank Darabont, 1999): reviewed by Maddy Fry
It can sometimes feel like Stephen King has written more books than he’s read. Whether or not that’s something to be proud of is debatable, and it undoubtedly shows in his later works. His 2006 outing, Lisey’s Story, had one Guardian critic claiming it “gave me the creeps, for all the wrong reasons.”
Yet there’s no denying The Green Mile, his doorstopper from a decade prior, and the accompanying epic film, is a masterpiece. Although I’d devoured the book in 2001, I was banned from watching the film due to it carrying an 18 certificate – my parents deemed the notorious botched execution scene too violent for a 12-year-old’s tender gaze. It wasn’t until Christmas 2019 that I finally got around to watching it. With no parentals in sight, I gleefully went back to it more than 5 times.
Clocking in at 3 hours and 8 minutes, it’s a bold and compelling depiction of pre-war Louisiana, where prison guards on the Green Mile, the last stop before the condemned meet their end, cling to their unpleasant vocation for fear of the Great Depression, while the inmates they guard cling to what only a charitable soul would call a life.
Yet the enclosed world of Death Row turns out to be a less hellish place than we might think. Paul Edgecombe (played by Tom Hanks), the firm but fair head of the guards, sees his routine upended when a convict named John Coffey, an enormous black man accused of rape and murder, turns out to have magical healing powers. Doubts form among Edgecombe and his colleagues about whether Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan) should ever have to face ‘Old Sparky,’ their grim nickname for the electric chair.
Given the cruelty and bloodlust of Louisiana justice, it’s a courageous move to make executioners likable and trustworthy. Paul Edgecombe, while no radical, is a decent and just purveyor of his duties. He deplores needless cruelty, has less prejudice towards non-whites than most of his contemporaries, is loyal to his colleagues and devoted to his wife. He’s a boss most people would kill for. It’s just unfortunate that so many people die on his watch.
And yet, we stick with him. Maybe it’s the Tom Hanks effect.
The camaraderie between prisoners and guards is believable, and the odd moments of tenderness and regret shown by inmates Bitterbuck and Del just before meeting ‘Old Sparky’ make it hard not to feel empathy. There’s no segregation, and the guards do their best to connect with the prisoners while sheltering them from any systemic abuse. When the time comes, they dispatch them quickly. It’s not justice, but in some ways, it’s more just than the world on the outside.
The more problematic parts in today’s world still stick out. Here as in The Shawshank Redemption, director Frank Darabont’s other masterwork, men find ordinary miracles in trying circumstances, discovering a gentler masculinity in the process – even if it leaves women thin on the ground.
The women and black people in The Green Mile exist to serve the needs of the white men, and Edgecombe’s wife Janet’s one moment of feistiness in the book is purged from the film. The morally dubious nature of capital punishment, and the fact that the Last Mile largely consists of inmates who are black, Cajun or Native American, isn’t really explored. In fact, the film seems to imply that Death Row is only a problematic institution if an inmate turns out be a black super-Jesus – and killing him is counter-productive because of all the white people that might need saving.
But the film’s deep heart’s core is more subtle than this. John Coffey takes the cancer he wrenches out of Melinda Moores, the warden’s wife, and forces it into the body of sadistic prison guard Percy Wetmore, in a scene akin to rape (rather bold given what black men were so often accused of), who then turns and shoots the demented and vindictive William Wharton, a convict who turns out to be guilty in more ways than one. The bad guys get their comeuppance – but as the film repeatedly makes clear, justice isn’t cheap, and the death of the bad doesn’t always mean closure for the good. John Coffey still rides the lightening, and Paul Edgecombe is punished with near-eternal life for letting it happen. Despite being a film about the death penalty, in King’s world the wages of sin are life, not death.
However, it’s crucial to realise that it’s all Coffey’s choice. There’s no panicked Garden of Gethsemane moment in the face of his own violent demise. Rather, he expresses weariness with his calling, having to mend the consequences of people being ‘ugly to each other.’ The question left to torment the viewer is whether Coffey really did want his life to be over, or whether he just knew Edgecombe’s promise to help him escape was an empty one. If you’re a black man in 1930s southern America then to paraphrase Robert Frost, the best way through is out.
Although the racial dynamics of the film are less self-aware than they could be, in many ways Coffey’s skin colour is irrelevant; he is simply the man with all the gifts, including an uncomplicated desire to reward the good and punish the bad. Unlike almost everyone around him, he chooses his own end, while Paul Edgecombe has to be content with eking out his final years in a nursing home he loathes, unsure of when his death will come, but sure that his prolonged existence, shorn of his loved ones, is a post-humous punishment from Coffey for allowing ‘a miracle of God’ to be executed.
Yet if Coffey’s very existence is a divine mandate, leaving early could be law-breaking of the most profound kind – and as all the characters discover, the Green Mile is ultimately a place where you can check out, but never leave.
I certainly haven’t. You won’t either.