Movie Review

• Author: Katherine J. Bennett,Thomas W. Satre
• DOI: 10.1177/0032885500080002008
• Published date: 01 June 2000
• Date: 01 June 2000
• Subject Matter: Articles

THE PRISON JOURN
MOVIE REVIEW
AL / June 2000
MOVIE REVIEW
The Green Mile, directed by Frank Darabont. Castle Rock Entertainment,
1999.
The Green Mile, directed by Frank Darabont and starring Tom Hanks, opened on
December 10, 1999. The movie is based on Stephen King’s six novellas that were
released one volume a month in 1996, each skyrocketing to the top of the New York
Times bestseller list. Darabont also directed The Shawshank Redemption in 1994,
another Stephen King prison story.
We attended The Green Mile expecting a movie about the death penalty, an expec-
tation perhaps created by the publicity about the movie and not having read the Ste-
phen King novellas. One discovers quickly that this movie is about much more than
the death penalty, and one might even wonder whether the death penalty is the central
theme of the movie at all.
The film is complex, creating a world in which a southern prison death row is the
setting for interaction between good and evil, the breakdown of life and the renewal of
life, and retribution and repentance. In addition, the movie fits the type that some
might call magical realism. In fact, a central character in “The Green Mile,” John
Coffey (played by Michael Clarke Duncan), is a person of superhuman dimensions
with powers to heal. Of course, he is an innocent inmate who, in the end, is executed
for a crime that he did not commit.
The narrator of the story is an aged Paul Edgecomb (played by Dabbs Greer) who
is now in a nursing home, retelling the story of his experiences in the summer of 1935
on the Green Mile. The Green Mile is on E Block, the death row of Cold Mountain
Penitentiary in Louisiana, so named because of the green floor that leads from death
row to the death chamber. The choice of the color green is one of the ironies of the
film, because green is also a color associated with life and rebirth. The younger Paul
Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) is the supervisor of E Block who manages it with efficiency,
but also with some compassion for the prisoners on death row.
Into this setting comes John Coffey, a giant Black man who has been wrongly con-
victed for the brutal killing of two children. Coffey is innocent in many ways. He is a
gentle person and afraid of the dark—not what one expects, given his size. We learn
before long that he possesses supernatural powers that are exercised in curing
Edgecomb of a urinary infection, healing the captain’s wife, and bringing a mouse
back to life. Also into this setting comes William (a.k.a. “Billy the Kid” and “Wild
Billy”) Wharton (Sam Rockwell), a thoroughly evil psychopath who was the real
killer of the two little girls.
Evil is not confined to the inmates. Only one of the inmates, Wild Billy, is truly
evil. Percy Wetmore (Doug Hutchison), a nephew of the governor’s wife and a person
who is using his connections to rise in the political system, is a new guard on death
THE PRISON JOURNAL, Vol. 80 No. 2, June 2000 228-232
© 2000 Sage Publications, Inc.
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MOVIE REVIEW
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row. Students of popular culture may want to consider whether Percy Wetmore fits
Robert Freeman’s (1998) “smug hack”...