..Naaaaah.
Not that I didn't enjoy The Green Mile... at times. It's 3 hours long, though, and you feel every one of those 180 minutes. It's laden with Stephen King's inelegant and often repetitious dialogue (no one can ever just say, "Yes" -- they have to drawl, "I jest about b'lieve that might be the case," and the same phrases, clearly dripping with SIGNIFICANCE, show up with the regularity of "Stupid is as stupid does"). And, though set in 1935, it's bracketed by those damn annoying "present day" scenes, like Saving Private Ryan had, with a cloying coda.
It took me about an hour to get into the story, after wading through some cutesy bits, lazy and obvious jokes, and way, way too much about Tom Hanks' urinary tract. The movie veers uncertainly from prison story to supernatural parable without convincingly meshing them and doesn't wholly succeed at either. I did feel the sentiment at times, but I felt like it was dishonestly achieved, like the filmmakers hadn't done the requisite work to trigger these emotions in me; they'd just hit the right stimuli and found the right actors. I defy anyone to watch Michael Clarke Duncan's performance and not be moved at least a little bit.
The characters jest about redefine the phrase "black and white" -- the good guys are awful damn good, and the bad guys have all the subtlety and shading of Snidely Whiplash. When the good guys lash out against the bad guys with nearly the same brutality the bad guys employ, we're encouraged to laugh or applaud, as though, to grotesquely paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, sadism in the defense of humanity is no vice.
Despite the lack of nuance, some excellent performances shine through. David Morse (who should play Bill Clinton in his life story) as a prison guard, Michael Jeter as a Cajun inmate, and Michael Clarke Duncan as the mysterious inmate John Coffey (who makes Lenny from Of Mice and Men look like the smart one) are all outstanding. Good ol' Harry Dean Stanton has a couple of amusing scenes, and god bless the movie that gives Graham Greene a job, but it would be nice if he actually had more than two lines next time. (You'll notice I didn't mention Tom Hanks. I like Hanks, but even his fans have to admit he doesn't have much of a range. He has two settings: nice and disgustingly nice. Oh, there goes that cynicism again.)
Inevitably, The Green Mile will be compared to The Shawshank Redemption: both are prison movies, both spring from stories by Stephen King, and both are written and directed by Frank Darabont. Shawshank is the better movie, but The Green Mile is not without its charms (even I have to admit, the mouse is adorable). A less jaded eye than mine will no doubt find more of those charms than I did.
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