It was probably only coincidence, what someone in a letter to me once called
"non-causal synchronicity" that I returned home from an afternoon
viewing of The Green Mile to hear the strains of Gustav Mahler's Resurrection
Symphony booming over the local classical radio station, XBACH. But after three
hours of sojourning in territory originally staked out by Stephen King, anyone
might succumb to a moment of superstitious credulity. Not that I would compare
either Stephen King--the author of the novel upon which The
Green Mile is
based--or the film's director, Frank Darabont, to Mahler, but a music lover
might be forgiven for noticing a certain similarity between the movie's long,
emotionally draining depiction of life on death row in a Louisiana prison in
1935, and one of Mahler's grandiose, stormy compositions. The Green
Mile's most
evident similarities, however, are with The Sixth Sense. In the first place,
both films venture far into the realm of the occult. Secondly, both movies deal with
the theme of criminal violence, especially violence directed against children,
and in both the dramatic center is an emotionally charged relationship between
an institutional figure and a character suffering from supernatural gifts: in
The Sixth Sense between the child therapist and the boy; in The Green Mile
between the guard Paul (Tom Hanks) and the condemned Black prisoner John Coffey
(Michael Clarke Duncan), who forms a bond with Paul after mysteriously curing
him of an excruciating bladder affliction. Thirdly, both films have a plot shtick that they save
until the last reel, and both are conspicuously slow paced.
But there the similarities end--to the advantage of The Green
Mile. Where The
Sixth Sense frequently drags because of inept direction, The Green Mile which is
really long--some 188 minutes--never gets tiresome in spite of its leisurely
tempo in telling its tale. Like M. Night Shyamalan, Darabont also has at least
one evident visual idiosyncrasy, a thoroughgoing use of close up's throughout
the movie--and some of these, like the shot that introduces Paul in old age as
the resident of a retirement home at the beginning, are very close indeed. Yet
no one who has a little bit of patience could watch the film for long without
being aware of the director's control over his material. There is never a moment
in The Green Mile when I had the sense that Darabont was sticking something on
the screen for the lack of anything better to put there, like the endless
procession of inane inserts in the Shyamalan picture. When he cuts to an
overhead shot of guards leading a prisoner to his execution, it counts as no
shot in The Sixth Sense ever does. It is true that Darabont pays a certain price
for his restraint when he starts to pull narrative rabbits out of his hat in the
last third of the film. Yet if the intended surprises have a curiously
anticlimactic effect coming so late and following on the heels of some of the
movie's dramatic high points, this shortcoming does not necessarily weaken The
Green Mile's impact as a whole. Where the movie has problems, they emerge
precisely at the point where The Green Mile becomes problematic--not at the
level of its basic construction, which is superb. Judged by current
standards, The Green Mile, which does not rely on fancy editing tricks
and makes a restrained use of effects, in spite of its quasi-supernatural
subject matter, is nearly a "classical" example of filmmaking.
The idea of combining the prison and horror film genres certainly seems an
unpromising one at first glance, like the subject for one of Monogram's or PRC's
cheesy thrillers from the 1940's. But in the movie the combination works very
effectively up to a point. On the one hand, the supernatural motifs add
something new and unusual to the staid convention of the traditional prison
movie; on the other, the primarily realistic treatment of the prison setting
provides an effective ballast to Stephen King's febrile fabulations. Moreover,
Darabont, whose last movie was the prison drama The Shawshank Redemption, wisely
gives the preference to the realistic foreground subject, instead of attempting
to balance off the one genre against the other. To what could just as well have
been a straightforward drama, the intervention of supernatural forces--whose
presence the film wisely does not try to explain--adds an unforeseen
complication which heightens rather than detracts from the main conflict.
Nevertheless, the somewhat arbitrary union of the two genres does not proceed
without friction, particularly when the film falls back upon the conventions of
the horror genre to motivate a deus ex machina dénouement which at
one blow not only unmasks and disposes of the criminal actually responsible for
the crime of which John Coffey has been unjustly accused, but also punishes the
sadistic prison guard Percy Wetmore (Doug Hutchison). At this point, the tension between the ultimately
irreconcilable demands of realism and fantasy reaches the breaking point. Still,
the not wholly successful attempt to straddle genres with fundamentally
contradictory requirements only sets the stage for a much larger problem.
John Coffey has not only been wrongly condemned to death for a crime he did
not commit; even worse, the highly unconventional means through which Paul
learns of Coffey's innocence--a kind of vision transmitted by the prisoner to
the guard--virtually preclude any hope of securing a reprieve for John.
Nonetheless, Coffey, far from rebelling at this unjust twist of fate, accepts it
wholeheartedly, making his execution into a sacrificial act that endows him with
a Christ-like aura--an aura the movie explicitly bestows on him in a remarkable
scene discussed below. In this regard, however, if John bears less resemblance to
the founder of the Christian faith than he does to such figures from American
literature as Herman Melville's Billy Budd or William Faulkner's Joe Christmas,
The Green Mile clearly makes him the vehicle of a supernatural revelation that
is doomed to be misunderstood or rejected by those around him. In fact, John himself, like many of Stephen King's characters,
experiences this revelation of invisible powers as a terrible affliction from
which only death can provide release, and Paul, in turn, to whom John
communicates some of this occult knowledge, suffers from it as from a curse at
the film's conclusion. Precisely like the gifts bequeathed by gods to mortals in
pagan mythology, these powers are highly ambivalent, carrying a potentially
fatal risk to whoever uses them. This is the stuff tragedy is made of, and there
is nothing edifying about tragedy itself, whose origins go back to primitive
religious rituals in which human sacrifice may have played a role. If this is
true, the death of tragic hero marked first of all the reenactment and
commemoration of the execution of a sacrificial victim, and The Green Mile
evokes these memories in its own horrifying execution sequences. Here The
Green Mile wisely refuses to draw any comforting moral from the spectacle
of capital punishment but recreates the sense of an irrational, barbaric rite
of catharsis in which neither morality nor justice play any part just as Franz
Kafka did in his story "The Penal Colony", echoing Friedrich
Nietzsche's observation in The Genealogy of Morals that "Without
cruelty, there is no festive celebration--the oldest, longest history of
humanity teaches us this--and punishment is so festive!"
The title of The Green Mile refers to the corridor that leads from the cell
block to the death chamber, but the film makes it clear in Paul's final
monologue at the end, when the action returns to the present day and the
retirement home in which it begins, that the phrase is a metaphor for human
existence itself--no more than a passageway to ultimate annihilation. The
Shawshank Redemption made good its title by providing Andy Dufresne (Tim
Robbins) with a symbolic rebirth when he first had to crawl through a sewer
main in order to escape, and then emerged into a baptismal rain shower which
cleansed him both of the physical filth left on his body by the sewer and of
the moral filth left in his spirit by his years in prison. But
in The Green Mile
there is no redemption, much less a resurrection. Nevertheless, the
movie possibly allows one exception to this gloomy rule in a sequence which
occurs late in the story, when John Coffey finally faces execution and asks to
watch a motion for the first and last time in his life. As he sits in a prison
theater watching Top Hat, Darabont shows him in close up from a low
angle, giving him a numinous glow by letting the beam from the projection
booth create a luminescent radiance around his head while Fred Astaire sings
"Heaven, I'm in heaven..." on the screen before him. Several
years Herbert Ross had used the "Let's Face the Music and Dance"
sequence from Follow the Fleet as a touching counterpoint to the
unhappy love affair of Arthur (Steve Martin) and Eileen (Bernadette Peters) in
Pennies from Heaven, but this scene makes a far more powerful, raw
appeal to the emotions, harking back to movies of the 1930's like Mervyn Le
Roy's I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) or Frank Capra's Lady
for a Day (1933) or Broadway Bill (1934). Described in this way,
the episode sounds unbearably kitschy, but on screen it is almost unbearably
emotional--as are some moments in Capra's best films. Visually the shots
transfigure Coffey, but their ultimate implication remains rightly uncertain. Do they
elevate Coffey to sainthood or do they only show the charismatic attraction of
a popular icon, an attraction quite similar to that exercised by cheap
religious icons on the faithful poor in Catholic countries? Or does he see
something our trained vision has rendered us immune to? To the archaic power
of the image as such?