#204: The Green Mile
Yes, it’s a magical minority story, but Michael Clarke Duncan elevates it
This review was originally posted to Twitter on January 5th, 2020.
Initial release: December 10, 1999
Director: Frank Darabont
For an author as prolific and popular as Stephen King, it’s not a shock that his work would be adapted to film, but while he’s got a lot of memorable horror titles under his belt, The Green Mile might be his best film adaptation, and Michael Clarke Duncan is why.
King’s fetish for the “magical minority” trope is well known at this point. His career is full of examples, usually involving folksy black people, often possessed of deeper connections to the hidden world that the “normal” white protagonists are unaware of. Even he acknowledges his use of this trope. In The Green Mile, Michael Clarke Duncan, as convicted death row inmate John Coffey, is the embodiment of this trope. Enormous and what some in his day might have called “simple,” he is a gentle giant with the power to heal sickness, and is an empath in the mystical sense of the word. Coffey is on death row in a Louisiana state pen, the block called “the Green Mile” for its violently green linoleum tiled corridor leading to the execution chamber. He stands convicted in the assault and murders of two young white girls after he was found with their bodies, sobbing his eyes out, saying he couldn’t “take it back.”
On the other side of the bars is Tom Hanks as Paul Edgecomb, a no-nonsense but gentle prison guard during the Depression when such an unpleasant career was often all you could get. He views death row as a sort of rest facility where prisoners can reflect and quietly await their fate.
He and his staff are gentle with Coffey, who’s afraid of the dark and speaks with childlike simplicity. After Coffey magically cures Edgecomb of a urinary tract infection, he begins to suspect that a gentle healer like Coffey couldn’t possibly be guilty of what he was accused of.
The prison system in Louisiana is notoriously cruel even by American prison standards, holding records for longest stints in solitary (see the Angola three) as well as just embodying the lessons of the stanford prison experiment in general. Being in prison in America is bad. Being in prison in Louisiana is hell. If you don’t believe me, Mother Jones sent a reporter into a privately-run Louisiana prison to expose how such institutions are motivated by profit; the United States was on track to ban private prisons until the trump administration reversed it. Add to this the race and class culture of the 1930s and you can see how a prison in Louisiana run the way Edgecomb does would seem preposterous, especially when dealing with someone accused of the crimes Coffey has… especially when they’re black.
But then again, he is just one guard, and death row is just one cell block, a small one at that. By making Edgecomb conflicted about what he does, expressing his distaste for it yet needing the job, the film sidesteps the bigger issues. In fact, Percy Wetmore (Dough Hutchison), the primary villain of the film, is a much more clear embodiment of the prison system and the kind of people it hires. A bully and a coward, Wetmore delights in hurting people, physically and verbally, and it doesn’t matter what side of the bars they’re on.
Ultimately, though, this film, much like Darabont’s previous King adaptation The Shawshank Redemption, isn’t so much a prison movie as it’s about the human beings in it, and how Coffey is ultimately the victim of institutional racism, embodied even in his own defense lawyer. Beneath a folksy country lawyer guise (played sharply by Gary Sinise, adding another stud to an already stellar cast) is a sneering racist who compares Coffey (and black people in general) to the family dog that one day attacked his son. With that kind of defense, who even really needs a trial? And make no mistake, this movie is not scrubbed of racial epithets. They come freely from the most vile of the characters, particularly “Wild Bill,” an obscene and dangerous prisoner driven entirely by id. And yet Coffey seems at peace with it; he’s gentle and docile, and admits that he doesn’t know much (another common facet of the magical minority) but when it comes to what he can do, he’s completely serious. Michael Clarke Duncan plays him to perfection.
The “magical minority” trope is rightly criticized for trapping minority characters in supporting roles for white people. But The Green Mile is as much about Coffey as it is about Edgecomb. Arguably, Coffey is the main character here. Edgecomb and his subordinates are just a witness to a Christ figure who in the end must die as a lesson in the cruelties of a system that was racist then and is racist now. That Coffey is at peace with that, too, only reinforces the Christ figure angle.
(It’s worth pointing out that his lawyer mentioned that he seemed to have fallen out of the sky, as he has no discernible past that anyone could find. So with that little clue it’s entirely possible that he was a literal angel — one who knows the constellations, at that.)
When Roger Ebert reviewed this movie he mentioned that he suspected that “good acting” in film is equal parts good casting and good characters. Give a talented actor the right character and they’ll bring that character to life in all the right ways. This is why Event Horizon manages to surpass its ludicrous script for example. With none other than Laurence Fishburne and Sam Neill in the leads, they take these ludicrous lines and somehow make you believe. Make you see. So I tend to agree with Ebert. If it was anyone other than Duncan in the role of Coffey, the film would run the risk of being mawkish and cartoonishly melodramatic. But he and Tom Hanks (who has brought the same even keel to almost every role he’s ever done) somehow make it work.
This is possibly the quintessential 90s Stephen King film: straying away from the horror of his earlier career that made him famous and instead going for a more spiritual angle that he’d been developing for some time to create a lengthy, human drama. Darabont’s decision to extend the running time to three hours and change is honestly what the film needed to work; King’s stories are generally pretty long as it is, but divided up into six parts as it originally was, there’s not much you can strip away and still leave it whole. Still, though, this is a smartly paced film that never seems to drag on too long; Darabont knows how to make quiet drama compelling, with starkly evocative shots that seem tailor-made for home video box art, and a soundtrack that is never too much or too little.
There are so many things in this film that could go against it. Yet it’s Michael Clarke Duncan who makes it all work. It wouldn’t be nearly as good without him, and the world is worse off for his absence.
