The Green Mile

...sibility...

...But what's the point of that...

...long enough to shoot "Wild Bill" to death...

...While the Kaiser's bombs made filthy work had to do all this because 'Wild Bill" was for everyone, she boiled the quarantined pajamas stripped the real perpetrator of the crime of which from fevered, suppurating children...

...The visuals movie meretricious...

...he's gained some weight and adopted an accent but, otherwise, it is what's going on behind his eyes that creates an Richard Alleva entirely new character, distinct from anything he's done before...

...point (well, almost) of being aggrieved decade he's done the best character work That the law should be more efficient in by them (though the one guard capable of since the heyday of Alec Guinness and detecting perpetrators...

...and (b) ter than Life Is Beautiful...

...Only when a definitely innocent terrorists, but Bruce Willis movies are (Contrast this with Uncle Tom's Cabin in man goes to the chair do Paul and Bru- honestly amoral schlock...

...El Commonweal 2 0 February 25, 2000...

...As "Brutal," a BUNGLED EXECUTION guard who's anything but, David Morse has virile dignity to spare...

...Now, render capital punishment just...

...Again, what is doned brutality in The Green Mile are and shock but didn't neglect to aver the the point of this...

...Note also that however nobly most of the guards behave most of the time, Darabont keeps contriving situations in haps achieve exoneration, but suppose flubs this point, too...

...have purple patches, too (the wicked It seeks to persuade us of two things: Let it be said that The Green Mile is bet- guard seen from above at the bottom of (a) capital punishment is wrong...

...Yet the film finally finds his crucifixion in the electric chair...

...To the vicious Percy and execrable "Wild Bill," this Christ figure does 1. The Laundromat, Sunday Morning not say, "Go, and sin no more...

...When she was made a Saint, In fact, John Coffy finally comes the crowd was filled with men and women she'd scrubbed across less as a Christ figure than as a in that contagious ward...

...That electrocuoperatically doomy...

...We don't note any which Paul and Brutal can slam the two capital punishment were reserved for real deterioration in the characters of villains around, and these batterings are people actually seen committing murder the guards as they kill guilty men, no staged not as the understandable lapsby hundreds of eyewitnesses and video matter how reformed these prisoners es of hard-pressed men but as the fulcameras...

...electric chair have stopped him...

...But "Wild Bill" of blood and urine, the slow leaks of bodies giving up was a condemned man...

...The Green Mile is of the guards...

...The figure first-class entertainer with The ShawThe closest this movie comes to rad- of John Coffy is, with or without his ini- shank Redemption, which I found simical criticism is in accenting the decency tials, an obvious effort to present a Christ- ple, strong, and good...

...That only misapplied made distasteful by the film's air of humanity of black slaves, thereby radi- capital punishment can shake the sen- sanctimony...

...warden's wife while curing her of brain The thick proprietor, keys rattling like Saint Peter, cancer, Coffy then pours the evil forcedoles out tokens so our clothes can slam against scratched glass, field (or whatever the heck it is) into the streaming soap and bleach, whirling like uncleansed souls who hope mouth of Percy, who becomes a zombie their memories if not their sins will fade into an equal gray...

...We see three its conclusion, but director-writer Frank big close-ups make us the intimates of electric-chair executions, the second esDarabont has no such problems with set- these men as well as their audience...

...The events inside this setting-the arrival on death row of the scarily huge but utterly saintly condemned man, John Coffy, and the healing miracles he performs...

...By using Paul regards his death row as the "in- at a Bruce Willis movie, I'm perfectly only shock and sentiment to turn us tensive care unit of a hospital," and thus willing to clap and stomp my approval against the death sentence, Darabont is manages to maintain his poise and san- as our hero mows down thousands of avoiding any radical criticism of our laws...

...So much of the story (based on a novel by Stephen King) is fantastic that, to be tenable, it needed to be anchored in an initial realism, and this Darabont has achieved...

...Frank Darabont proved himself a blacks are subhuman...

...Here, nocent man would go on living and perSouth that lies outside the prison is also captured with sufficient verisimilitude...

...In the past innocent...

...As the Pope sang "Sancta," they fingered white liberal's fantasy of an ideal black their clean collars and smelled the furious prayer of bleach...

...Wouldn't the the ghost and flesh together...

...Now for the second theme...

...John Coffy later tells Paul that he into the laundry...

...fillment of their moral rectitude...

...She blessed the holy Coffy was accused, and that evil people stink of bleach for cleaning linen and her hands, stripping them just have to be stopped...

...Roberto Benigni a spiral walkway as if he were already contact with a saintly personality can upcouldn't give us a plausible Italian town in the pit of hell), but mainly the camera lift one's life forever...

...The Depression-era works without much make-up...

...Worthy ideas, but for the first half of his movie or a believ- nestles close to the guards and cons as look at Darabont's methods of persi iasion ably horrifying concentration camp for they converse, josh, and bicker, and the Capital punishment...

...In fact selves why these good-hearted men sel, and miracles flow out of him and it's an artistic oxymoron: an anti-capitalshould be made accomplices in the ma- onto all good people near him before he punishment movie with a vigilante senchinery of death...

...Tricky staghe Green Mile does for capi- moment of seeing it...

...ity...

...This makes us ask our- like figure: Love, forgiveness, good coun- twisted and powerfully lousy...

...In fact, John Coffy becomes the instruNothing is really clean...

...cally attacking a proslavery tenet, that sibilities of good men...

...the troubles set off by the vicious guard Percy and an even more vicious prisoner nicknamed "Wild Bill...

...Having but let themselves be folded, ready for our bodies' misery sucked all the negative force out of the and dirt once more, like generous innkeepers who never ask...

...tion is horrible...

...The fits of conwhich H.B...

...the apple juice a mother pours out for her mismatched children...

...the utmost tact and moral inquisitive- fying terseness and an unobtrusive local Why then is this skillfully crafted ness, and uses it as grist for the mill of flavor inform the dialogue...

...His writing stum- ing makes the 6'5" Michael Clarke Duntal punishment what Life Is bles into purple patches (a distinctly non- can look seven feet tall, but it is DunT Beautiful did for the Holo- literary prisoner suddenly murmurs of can's inherent dignity and groundcaust: It takes a monumen- his young wife being "bare-breasted in swelling voice that make his portrait of tal, harrowing subject, crying out for the firelight") but, on the whole, a satis- John Coffy mountainous...

...pop entertainment...

...Of course, in a cruelty has earned the hatred of guards Peter Sellers, but, unlike them, Hanks system without the death penalty an inand convicts alike...

...The guards behave as some violence, and then slam us it does...

...the changes brought into the guards' lives when they come to believe in Coffy's innocence without knowing how to save him-slide in and out of the realm of the supernatural, but Darabont possesses the requisite cinematic skills to keep us believing in what we see, at least at the Commonweal 19 February 25, 2000 But, nota bene, his blessings flow only in the direction of those who are already Laundry virtuous...

...Sam Rock'The Green Mile' well's "Wild Bill" is scary and funny, sometimes simultaneously...

...fabricated is credible, being grim but not bling pace until it must slam us with What's the point of this...

...sheets are stained gray with weariness ment of their earthly punishment...

...The death row he's editing keeps the action at a nice, am- improperly, but all of them unnerving...

...they're aware of one another's annoying I'm not sure I have any adjectives left We learn that one condemned man is tics and habits but have grown past the with which to praise Hanks...

...Then why can't a progood men always do when they have First among equals in the fine cast is capital-punishment advocate simply inworked too long and too closely together: Tom Hanks as Paul, the head guard, but dicate painless execution as a solution...

...Stowe also used sentiment tal renounce their posts...

...Percy then regurgitates whatever 2. Cleanliness and Godliness Coffy spewed into him but, remaining When the peasant girl, who did not know she'd one day be brain-benumbed, is confined to an asySaint Bertilla, joined the Antwerp convent, she was sent lum...

...The pecially horrible because it's carried out ting or atmosphere...

...man: someone who not only suffers the errors of the white man but suffers for the white man, redeeming his oppresDeborah S. Burnham sors with his taciturn beatitude...

...Nor are they portrayed as capable of redemption, Nothing here is new except the autumn light washing through since they're one-dimensional monsters...

...Would the irrefutability of guilt seem by the time of their executions...