'The Green Mile': A walk along Stephen King's miracle street
By Tam Notosusanto
JAKARTA (JP): It's not wrong to associate Stephen King with horror stories, to stamp him with the label of horror novelist. After all, this is the man responsible for classic spine- chilling, hair-rising tales such as Carrie, The Shining, Salem's Lot and Firestarter, all of them have undergone adaptations to film on screens big and small.
But it would be erroneous to assume that is all there is to him. King is not a horror writer, he is a writer, period. He weaves poignant psychological stories just as well as he creates suspenseful, macabre tales. Just watch Stand by Me (1986), Misery (1990), The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Dolores Claiborne (1995) and Apt Pupil (1998), films faithfully adapted from King's ghoul-free creations.
It is this select group of "Stephen King films" that The Green Mile is part. Like those five, this one is not about monsters and demons, it's about human characters, with their human problems. The only demons that exist here lie inside the darkest part of the human psyche.
The film takes place at a Louisiana penitentiary in 1935, specifically, a cell block provided for death row convicts. Here's where senior guard Paul Edgecombe (Tom Hanks) works along with his colleagues Brutus Howell (David Morse), Harry Terwilliger (Jeffrey DeMunn) and Dean Stanton (Barry Pepper).
They tend to the needs of the prisoners every day as they wait for the time of the execution. When those days arrive, the guards bring the particular inmate from his cell to the electric chair, all the way across the long green-painted linoleum floor that earns the nickname "the green mile".
Their routine is disrupted with the arrival of a new inmate, the hulking, eight-feet-tall black man John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan), sentenced to death for the murder of two little girls.
Once the guards get to know him, though, they begin to have doubts about Coffey's guilt. Despite his massive, terrifying appearance, Coffey is really a gentle giant: a sweet-natured, slow-witted man who stupefies the guards with his request to "leave the lights on, because I get scared in the dark".
And they are further bedazzled by Coffey's apparent gift of extraordinary powers: the prisoner frees Edgecombe from his chronic urinary tract infection, he brings the dead pet mouse belonging to a fellow inmate back to life and, finally, he performs miraculous healing on the cancer-ridden wife (Patricia Clarkson) of the prison warden (James Cromwell), all with the touch of his hands. That leaves the guards with the difficult dilemma of sticking to their professional code, or do something to help this miracle angel avoid the electric chair.
Writer-director Frank Darabont keeps much of King's prison tale intact. In fact, this is not the first time Darabont adapted a King novel: he's the filmmaker responsible for The Shawshank Redemption, which also has a prison setting.
And it is probably a magical coincidence that The Green Mile mirrors Shawshank's Academy Award achievement: the newer film also received nominations in the categories of acting, screenwriting, sound and for Best Picture.
However, The Green Mile suffers somewhat from its oversimplicity and overwrought sentimentality. The strangely benign relationship between the guards and the prisoners is mind- boggling, and the guards, led by Hanks -- himself Hollywood's Ambassador of Geniality -- are such kind, good-spirited saints that never convey the trauma of men who have witnessed execution after execution and have actually led some other men to their deaths.
Nevertheless, Darabont manages to capture the story's biblical resonance, nicely delivered by the character Coffey, a man with the initial J.C., who performs miracle healing only to be unjustly condemned to death and has to be eventually sacrificed. The film's framing device that has the old Edgecombe narrating the story, also points out how Coffey's touch eventually makes Edgecombe a prisoner in his own longevity: he has to walk his own Green Mile toward his long-delayed end.
Despite its three-hour running time, the film never once loses us, thanks to King's rich, exciting narrative and the theatrics of a scene-stealing mouse nicknamed Mr. Jingles. Darabont complements with his apt orchestration of visuals and sound, notably the miracle-healing sessions and the ghastly execution scenes, which are difficult to forget.
And no matter how thinly drawn the characters, they are perfectly delivered by a cast of first-rate actors. Most prominent of them is Duncan, not just because of his size, but mainly because of his Oscar-nominated performance as an innocent who wants nothing but do some good to good people.
The one performance in this film that surpasses Duncan's is by Doug Hutchison. He plays the malicious guard Percy Wetmore, the only believable character here, as an interesting mixture of childish nerdiness and vengeful hatred. Hutchison becomes the demon in this Stephen King story, and the malevolence this actor projects makes the character more frightening than any other creature King has ever invented.