Doing Hard Time On Death Row

For Frank Darabont, "doing time" means taking it. As the adapter and director of two Stephen King prison stories, Darabont is a man with a slow hand. He wants you to share the agony of ennui felt by jailbirds whose only job is marking time while scheming to escape or waiting to die--just like the rest of us. In The Shawshank Redemption he managed to invest this anxious leisure with tension and transcendence.

Odd how a style that looked spare in one movie can feel bloated in the next. That's the case with The Green Mile, reverently taken from King's serialized novel. It's 1935, and we're on a Southern prison's death row, where the only recreation is watching a mouse commandeer the corridor. Enter a new inmate, John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan), a giant black man with a gift of preternatural empathy; he can literally suck the pain out of people. Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks), the chief guard of E Block, is in awe of this white magic. He benefits from it, uses it to help a friend and, eventually, pays for it.

The piece has some eerily effective moments. The sponging of a condemned man's head makes electrocution seem a sacrament: baptism and extreme unction in a single dab. The healing scenes will evoke tears, some of them earned. And there's a lot of sharp acting, led by Hanks' pained restraint. The two villains are vigorously portrayed: a sadistic, craven guard (Doug Hutchison) and a strutting, rabid inmate (played with a daringly lunatic, dark-star quality by Sam Rockwell), whose crimes are even worse than we feared. At the core, though, one finds a slacky, sappy film. The human mystery that breathed so easily in Shawshank is often forced here. Grandstanding reaction shots of teary guards cue us to John Coffey's miraculous power as surely as the big man's initials hint at his majesty.

And there's no excuse for the movie to run, or meander, for more than three hours. Darabont must believe his film will move audiences, or he wouldn't have had the nerve to end it with the line "Oh, Lord, sometimes the green mile is so long." To more than a few viewers, this one will feel like a life sentence.