![]() Much of a performance is created in the filmmaking itself, in photography and editing and the emotional cues of music. I have started to suspect that when we talk about "good acting" in the movies, we are really discussing two other things: good casting and the creation of characters we react to strongly. Without describing the supernatural mechanism that is involved, I can explain in Coffey's own words what he does with the suffering he encounters: "I just took it back, is all." How he does that and what the results are, all set up the film's ending-in which we are reminded of another execution some 2,000 years ago. Other moments of great impact involve a tame mouse which Delacroix adopts, a violent struggle with Wharton (and his obscene attempts at rabble-rousing), and subplots involving the wives of Paul ( Bonnie Hunt) and the warden ( Patricia Clarkson).īut the center of the movie is the relationship between Paul and his huge prisoner Coffey. One execution is particularly gruesome and seen in some detail the R rating is earned here, despite the film's generally benevolent tone. Some of them involve the grisly details of the death chamber, and the process by which the state makes sure that a condemned man will actually die ( Harry Dean Stanton has an amusing cameo as a stand-in at a dress rehearsal with the electric chair). (We might indeed question whether a Louisiana Death Row in the 1930s would be so fair and hospitable to a convicted child molester, but the story carries its own conviction, and we go along with it.) There are several sequences of powerful emotion in the film. And in Louisiana in the 1930s, a black man with such evidence against him is not likely to be acquitted by a jury. Yet Coffey was found with their broken bodies in his huge arms. The reason Paul consults the lawyer is because he comes to doubt this prisoner could have killed the little girls. Looming over all is the presence of John Coffey ( Michael Clarke Duncan), a man whose own lawyer says he seems to have "dropped out of the sky." Coffey cannot read or write, seems simpleminded, causes no trouble and exudes goodness. The story is in no haste to get to the sensational and supernatural it takes at least an hour simply to create the relationships in the prison, where Paul's lieutenant ( David Morse) is rock-solid and dependable, where the warden ( James Cromwell) is good and fair, and where the prisoners include a balmy coot named Delacroix ( Michael Jeter) and a taunting monster named Wharton ( Sam Rockwell). ![]() "The math doesn't quite work out," he admits at one point, and we find out why. The movie is told in flashback as the memories of Paul as an old man, now in a retirement home. By the end, when he is asked to forgive them for sending him to the electric chair, the story has so well prepared us that the key scenes play like drama, not metaphor, and that is not an easy thing to achieve. In "Shawshank" the black man was the witness to a white man's dogged determination, and here the black man's function is to absorb the pain of whites-to redeem and forgive them. ![]() It involves the supernatural, for one thing-in a spiritual, not creepy, way.īoth movies center on relationships between a white man and a black man. That, too, was based on a King prison story, but this one is very different. It is Darabont's first film since the great " The Shawshank Redemption" in 1994. "The Green Mile" (so-called because this Death Row has a green floor) is based on a novel by Stephen King, and has been written and directed by Frank Darabont. He is suffering from a painful infection and suffering, too, because Percy ( Doug Hutchison) is like an infection in the ward: "The man is mean, careless and stupid-that's a bad combination in a place like this." Paul sees his duty as regulating a calm and decent atmosphere in which men prepare to die.
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