If this is Christian allegory, I'll eat my mitre

Rating: 6/10 (22 June 2000)

Everyone remember the story about Christ and the public stoning? Well, to the extent that "The Green Mile" is Christian allegory, Christ said something like this: `Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. -Oh wait, I'M without sin!" THUNK!
Why does everyone assume that this story even takes place in a Christian universe? Is it because so many of the characters are Christian? But this is 1930s American South. What did you expect? When a character with supernatural powers of healing lumbers up, OF COURSE everyone assumes the powers are God-given; they assume his perfectly ordinary eyebrows are God-given, too; but the script gives us no reason to suppose that they're right. Rather the reverse. There's something random and essentially pointless about Coffey's abilities and actions, something that suits an atheist or pagan universe in which all sorts of oddities just turn up, something which doesn't justify the atmosphere of reverential ponderousness adopted by Frank Darabont and his cast. (What IS that brown dust that Coffey spews out periodically? Is it now OBLIGATORY for directors to run the rough footage through a computer and make it worse somehow?) But it's a very modern sort of paganism. There's nothing at all beautiful about the magic, which is a telling flaw.
Look: it's not as bad as I thought it would be. I THOUGHT that Darabont would have let the extravagant praise heaped upon "The Shawshank Redemption" (a good film, by the way) go to his head, and produce a slow, lingering, pompous version of a less interesting story. Sort of true, but it has its moments (although, as more than one critic I've read has added, "perhaps by chance"). I thought Tom Hanks would be unendurable. Surprisingly, he does a good job, all things considered. I thought the racism would get on my nerves. It's not really racist. Coffey is a simpleton, but not because of the rule that blacks must be simpletons; rather, the rule is that good people must be simpletons. (Coffey is so good he can barely form sentences.) I thought that the bookends would waste my time and weaken the film's structure. They do.
Objectively speaking, a bad film; but, although my interest waxed and waned, it was easy to stay involved through to the end.