A mix of Hollywood sentimentality and thematic ambition.

Rating: 8/10 (2 August 2000)

The Green Mile is an odd and somewhat over-long, yet fascinating, blend of Hollywood sentimentality (evil guard vs. good guards, the idiot/Christ-figure black giant, the mouse plot) and thematically ambitious, cinematographically arresting storytelling. Its metaphoric title aptly suggests the rich, ambiguous interplay of life and death imagery surrounding all the characters - not only those facing imminent electrocution in a 1930s contraption that suggests, however realistic its depiction, the instrument of torture a twisted medieval baron demonically possessed with the knowledge of electricity might wield on his worst enemy.
The 'green mile' of the prison death row supervised by prison guard, Paul Edgecomb (wonderfully acted by Tom Hanks), is on one level a short painted corridor whose length is measured not literally in feet, but rather figuratively, in the emotional intensity of certain, scheduled, horrifying death. Here 'greenness' functions both as a gallows humor joke and as a sign of redemption (all the inmates, even, ironically, the 'innocent' ask for forgiveness as their last earthly act). On another, more allegorical, level, the green mile is life itself, filled with love, yes, and beauty and even miraculous generosity and healing, but filled even more to the brim (the film suggests) with brutality, suffering, and loss Â– and of course culminating in an execution less ritualized but no less certain, and often no less gruesome, than the one faced by the socially condemned.
That the pain of living outweighs the joy is indicated, among other ways, by director Frank Darabont's choice and nearly exclusive use of institutional settings (prison, mental hospital, nursing home), by execution scenes whose prolonged horror produce existential as well as physical nausea, and by its inclusive catalog of the slings and arrows that human beings collectively must face (from the relative triviality of urinary infection to the nightmarish rape and murder of children).
Perhaps even more than its length, slow pace, and strange mix of realistic and supernatural modes, the most un-Hollywood element of The Green Mile is its insistence on a tragic, and rather orthodox Christian, view of life and death.