L'empereur a besoin des kex

Rating: 4/10 (14 October 2012)

What is The Green Mile? It's an extended flashback wherein a man in a rest home relates his youth as a death row prison guard in 30s Louisiana, and in particular his experience at the hands of John Coffey. Coffey is a colossal black simpleton who's in for the rape and murder of two white girls, but this is Hollywood circa 1999 so obviously he never done it. On the other hand he has a third eye, can project third-person footage of past events directly onto your mind by grabbing your pods, and can cure anything from the clap to inoperable brain tumours to a malfunctioning moral conscience by inhaling the bad from out of your body, then expelling it as a large swarm of insects (?) He can also bring pulverised mice back from the dead. But not two murdered girls, mind you, because they had been dead for 'too long' and that would just be silly.
I know Stephen King novels are notoriously hard to adapt, but...
With two exceptions, all the major figures in TGM, including, for all we are shown, the condemned men, are Good. They attempt to do the right thing without fail regardless of consequences, or they are endearingly simple, or, as in Black Jesus' case, both. The two exceptions are such laughable caricatures of evil they might as well have the word of curse tattooed across their foreheads; such manichaean nonsense is not the stuff of great films. All the considerable acting talent on display in this film can't quite bring these cardboard characters to life.
The good guys may be Good but they're not particularly effective. They react to the grossest provocations (such as being urinated over by a lag, which I expect would earn you a good kicking in most jurisdictions even today) with stoical good humour such that at times the film succeeds in making a Depression era execution block look like a Butlins run by the Keystone Kops.
I took leave of the film at the point when Hanks' character, concerned about his boss' wife's cancer, invites his work buddies to breakfast on the lawn, where he outlines his plan to a) remove what as far as everyone in the world is concerned is a double child rapist / murderer from his cell and take him out on the road b) dope another prisoner to cover their tracks and c) lock one of their own colleagues, who is out of the loop, in solitary for the duration, there to produce realistic bangs and moans in order to lead the other prisoners to think (b) is in there instead. All on the off-chance that a man who resurrected a squashed mouse and fixed Hanks' genito-urinary system might be able to cure cancer into the bargain.
Needless to say, they agree to this gargantuan lapse of professionalism and sanity almost without hesitation. The obvious question is raised and dismissed in a single sentence. Why not ask the boss to bring her into the prison instead? Because he's cautious and sceptical and therefore wouldn't go for it (who could blame him, really?) But even smashing his door in while he was out, force-feeding his wife sedatives and dragging her to the jail bound and gagged would make more practical sense.
What they do instead, then, is to doorstep him, with Coffey, completely unannounced in the wee hours of the morning. Because obviously he is far more likely to react favourably to a home invasion than a polite suggestion over the water cooler. Mr Cautious emerges with a shotgun in a state of some alarm, as one would in the circumstances. But for all his front he still lets them into the house and up the stairs. Now call me wacky but if several men tipped up in uniform at stupid o'clock with a giant murderer in tow who I didn't have a prayer of stopping by physical means, hell bent on entering my terminally ill wife's bedroom with God knows what in mind, but I had a gun to hand I'd have shot every one of the bastards half a dozen times before they got within arm's length.
But anyway. Incidentally, the way that Wetmore is set up as a cartoonish prick so that we are almost forced to applaud when his colleagues turn on him is more than ironic for a film that's supposed to warn us against kneejerk reactions.
Watching this film, in fact, reminded me how far we have come since the late 90s. TGM with its crude mixture of political correctness and dewy- eyed sentimentality wouldn't pass muster in this age of withering cynicism. I'm not Spike Lee's biggest fan but his criticism of Coffey's character as the archetypal Magickal Negro was on point.
Finally, if anyone actually changed their mind about the death penalty on the strength of a film with about as much grounding in reality as Who Framed Roger Rabbit they need to have their right to vote revoked.
Two stars for some very solid performances, one more because my wife liked it, plus 'tilt' because the main man died recently and seemed like the kind of fellow you could set your watch by.