Enjoyable, if a bit overlong and problematic

Rating: 8/10 (23 December 1999)

First, let me say that I am an enormous fan of Frank Darabont's "The Shawshank Redemption," and believe it to be in the Top Ten films of the decade. So, I went into "The Green Mile" with very high expectations. I was both not disappointed and reserved in my praise. The film does so many things right that it's hard to knock from any angle. The performances, especially by Hanks and Duncan, are stirring and near-perfect. The production values are flawless. And Darabont's direction is, once more, exactly in tune with his material. That's all the good stuff. As for the bad, I have two major complaints. The first one falls on the shoulders of Darabont. He simply has to learn how to move his stories along at a quicker pace. There are very, very few stories out there that require 3 hours to tell in a movie, and this isn't one of them. The pace is so deliberate at times that it weighs down the emotion - it would be more stark, honest and moving if it had more of a sense of pace. The movie does, after all, deal with the imminant nature of all of these character's deaths, which would be more easily understood if the audience felt that they were snuffed out too quickly, rather than overstaying their welcome (as I felt Michael Jeter's Dell did). My next complaint is with King's story, and what I feel is the inherent racism in the story of John Coffey. Having the only black character in the movie be both semi-retarded and magical plays upon ancient misconceptions about blacks in America, especially in the South. As they do with many foreign cultures they don't understand, Americans have placed black people in the category of "other," seeing them as exotic, mystical and ethereal. There is nothing patently offensive in this, but it's an oversimplification and, frankly, it's just uninteresting. These are just my thoughts. Other than this small, rather nit-picky criticisms, I'd say "Green Mile" is one of the better films in a fantastic year of cinema.
Lonnie