![]() ![]() ![]() The story is told by the elderly Paul Edgecomb (Dabbs Greer), who lives inside a senior living center. ![]() It’s a three-hour commercial film whose tension remains unresolved to rather gloomy and inauspicious effect. Here’s a story with devastating jolts of emotion (including three electric chair executions, each of them horrific to varying degrees), animal cruelty, prison violence, and an ending that leaves its protagonist in a perpetual state of foreboding and existential crisis. Even though it contains moments of sentimentality, it is a bleak tale. The critical notion of The Green Mile ’s syrupy condition has always confused me. Writing in Film Comment, Dave Kehr criticized the film’s geniality and described the inmates as having “the fuzzy huggableness of hand puppets.” Just as many critics assessed The Shawshank Redemption as an oddly pleasant film for a story about life in prison, a few writers, standing out in the majority of positive assessments, would reduce The Green Mile to feel-good entertainment. In some critical circles, reviewers took Darabont to task for the saccharine, feel-goodness of his work. Even so, the result performed well during the December holiday season, earned accolades for relative newcomer Michael Clarke Duncan, and secured four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. Given the belated renown of The Shawshank Redemption, Darabont received a wider berth with The Green Mile, including a budget of $60 million, a dream cast, and a luxurious three-hour runtime, all for a film that proves quite bleak. Repeated at-home viewings raised the film to a cult status and, over time, it was celebrated as a favorite among viewers-it soon earned the number one spot on IMDB’s user-voted list of the top 250 films, which it maintains to this day. with underwhelming box-office performance regardless, it received seven Oscar nominations and became a major success on home video and in cable television markets. Two years earlier, Darabont had released The Shawshank Redemption at Warner Bros. Not long after The Green Mile was published in 1996, Darabont approached King about acquiring the rights. Though it might have been reduced to a mushy, touching crowd-pleaser, Darabont’s willingness to explore the darker regions of King’s story distinguish it. ![]() Far less uplifting than his other maudlin efforts, The Green Mile is a film of extreme poles, comfortably pleasant in one moment and appallingly cruel the next. More compelling, however, is Darabont’s willingness to present the story as another feel-good prison film, but instead, he delivers a saddening tale of spiritual uncertainty. Many have censured The Green Mile for its more earnest scenes and the limited characterization of its sole black character, and while I wrestle to defend the film against such critiques, I must acknowledge that the power of its drama is immersive and moves me. But his 1999 film, one of Darabont’s many adaptations of a Stephen King text, finds an uncommon balance between his occasional Capra-esque optimism and his capacity for bitter despair. In the former, he explored hopeful, life-affirming stories such as The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Majestic (2001), whereas his latter mode isolated and confronted his audience with The Mist (2007), an unforgettably grim horror picture. Darabont has given us stirring examples of each mode. The Green Mile finds writer-director Frank Darabont operating in two modes, that of a sentimentalist and an unyielding cynic. ![]()
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