Once again, the author delivers his message from the inside of one of our nation's long-forgotten penal institutions. King's first prison tale, the short story "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption," received marvelous treatment from Frank Darabont (both in the screeplay and in the direction), and that story of the effect of prison life on the individual went on to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture in 1994. Darabont's excellence on that project likely led him to be a top choice for producers when developing The Green Mile, for he developed The Shawshank Redemption into a thematically rich, well told, crowd-pleasing story.

      In adapting The Green Mile, writer/director Darabont is painstakingly and likely thanklessly faithful. Such a comment is lukewarm at best, however, for in his nearly verbatim transition, Darabont has strung the running time out to over 180 minutes. Granted, the source material is highly complex and hardly pedestrian, but in this case a stubbornly exact rendition proves to be far less flattering of the novel. Darabont's script for The Shawshank Redemption was much more inventive.

      Behind the camera, Darabont is much better. He enthusiastically tells the story of Paul Edgecombe (Tom Hanks), the head guard on Cold Mountain Penitentiary's Death Row cellblock during the early years of the Depression. In all of his years there, Paul never quite had a year like 1935, for as he narrates, "that was the year that John Coffey came to stay at the Green Mile." Coffey (Michael Duncan Clarke, Armageddon), a gigantic black man, was arrested for brutally raping and killing two white girls, and in the Deep South of the 1930s, the conviction was a cinch. But as Paul sees it, Coffey's timid, kindhearted demeanor is hardly that of a murderer. He's even more convinced when he discovers that Coffey has the gift to suck death and disease out of living objects and make them clean and whole again. "I do not see God putting a gift like that in the hands of a murderer," Paul adamantly states. But the fact remains that John Coffey is on Death Row, and he must be executed unless Paul and his fellow guards decide to do something about it.

      The fellow guards make up the supporting cast, and in a rare show of ambition, the players for those roles nearly outperform Tom Hanks. Hanks is likely one of the best actors working in Hollywood today, and his turn as Paul Edgecombe is as textured and full of dimension as any he's ever given. With this performance, he has once again transcended the job of an actor, crossing the line between playing a character and being the character. He has an outstanding ability to squeeze every drop of emotion from a given scene, and furthermore to get the audience to do the same.

      Alongside Paul stand Brutus Howell (David Morse, Crazy in Alabama), Dean Stanton (Barry Pepper, Saving Private Ryan), Harry Terwilliger (Jeffrey DeMunn, The X-Files), and the evil Percy Whetmore (Doug Hutchison, Batman and Robin). David Morse is probably the best outside of Tom Hanks, lending a subtly benevolent performance on par with his brief but effective appearance in 1997's Contact. Hutchison is thoroughly evil as the troublemaker Percy, and along with the inmate Wild Bill Wharton (Sam Rockwell, A Midsummer Night's Dream), he fills the movie's bad guy role. In less dominant but still important roles are Michael Jeter and Graham Greene as repentant convicts and James Cromwell as the prison's sympathetic warden. Criminally underused is Gary Sinise as John Coffey's defense attorney.

      With this cast of all-stars at his disposal, director Darabont is able to coax a great deal of superbly dramatic footage out of every screen moment. The execution scenes are particularly moving, as prisoners utter prayers during their last moments on Earth, and the one time an execution goes horribly wrong is a solid candidate for the film's most disturbing moment. The prison and death row cellblock are created in exact concordance with King's description in the novel -- Death Row is often said to be a man's last mile on earth, and the cellblock at Cold Mountain is called the Green Mile because the ceiling and floor are covered with lime-green tiles. It is also the home of a strangely isolationist culture, in which the events of the day's business remain confined to the block: "What happens on the Mile stays on the Mile. Always has."

      Such a fantastically surreal setting lends itself to a great story, and this is The Green Mile's most winning quality. Unfortunately, in both the King novel and the Darabont screenplay, the story is bracketed by a pair of present-day sequences, in which a significantly aged Paul looks back on his days as a prison guard. These are entirely unnecessary, and it's unclear why King chose to write the novel as a story within a story; Darabont has toned things down a bit but has not completely omitted them. Nevertheless, that and the movie's length are the only complaints to be made. To be sure, the movie becomes ponderously dull at times, as all good movies are wont to do, but it is largely a triumph for King and for Darabont. Though it does not top the amazing success of The Shawshank Redemption, it's about as close as Frank Darabont could have been expected to come.

Craig Roush, 1999